


(make me brighter when) you make me fade

by ZenzaNightwing



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: 5+1 Things, A whole bunch of fucked up shit holy shit why the hell did I write this, Angst, Animal Instincts, Backstory, Badly written fight scenes, Blindness, Blood and Gore, Bloodlust, Death, Dubious Ethics, Dubious Morality, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/M, Heavy Angst, I'm legitimately terrified of and horrified with myself, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Sex, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Insanity, Medical Experimentation, Medical Inaccuracies, Medical Torture, Medical Trauma, Prostitution, Same words as Pride and Paladins but not the same verse, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-13
Updated: 2018-03-06
Packaged: 2019-02-01 17:38:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12709719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZenzaNightwing/pseuds/ZenzaNightwing
Summary: Five Times Lotor killed for his Generals and one time he killed one of them.(Really dark. Really fucked up.)





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title of the song, and pretty much this entire story, taken from K.Flay.

The cloak is heavy around him as he walks down the darkened streets of Eltran-5, mask put in place for extra caution. There are whispers around, hidden shadows exchanging GAC and products, the darkness of disguises shying away from the dim lighting only a few of the streetlights possess. Glass crunches under his feet, from some broken store window or one of the shattered lights above, it doesn't particularly matter. The streets themselves seem to mutter, to bleed and die and corrupt at every step, at every hoarse exhale and shaking hand holding a blaster.

 

This particular hellhole is a holdover from almost the very beginning of the Empire, but it's too corrupt at this point for any of the higher ups to particularly care about anything to do with it. It used to be one of those 'old-times' places, where one could go to marvel at the old ways and just how advanced everything became. All of that was lost once it became clear just how dedicated they were to it, to the point where their security was entirely compromised. After that, it was nothing but a black market hotspot and a drug den, only a step in some direction from the Swap Moons of old.

 

The perfect place for an exile.

 

He slips off to the side, away from the security droid blindly walking down the road. The design is poor, probably one of the older models, made from the cheaper stuff. The new ones have a tendency to get jumped and salvaged for their metals, so the few that still walk down the streets are the utterly ineffective and worthless anyway.

 

Somewhere in the distance there's a scream.

 

He keeps walking.

 

There's even more whispering further down the alley, and there's the footsteps of another approaching sentry. Or maybe a living guard with a death wish. He could care less, but it means it will be a bit more difficult to be on the streets for a while.

 

The alleys, while most definitely not safe, are better for avoiding detection, and there is no way in any of the Eleven Sacred Realms is he going to get caught in a Galran territory after a successful few thousand decafeebs on the run.

 

The whispering persists, echoing around with the scent of stale breath that smells of old vomit, blood and rotten things. The air itself burns with chemical fumes and smoke, carrying the acrid stench of soiled garments, rotten meat, garbage, and blaster energy. It feels like any of the other countless outposts he'd flitted between, outrunning cameras and sentries and those looking to make good of promises and threats.

 

He has no idea why the Oracle sent him here, only that she did with sapphire lips turned up in a smile, and a knowing look in her glassy, silver eyes. _Your first family betrayed you, little boy._ She had said, and her thin, bony fingers danced around on the ivory table, over the symbols etched with fervent care into the wood, over Kova's fur. _It is time for you to find a second._ And then he was sent to this backwater, crime-filled, desperate planet on the whims of a blind Seer that reminds him far too much of the witch who stole his mind.

 

The one benefit about the maze-like mess of streets and alleyways was that you could get practically anywhere in the city, without being seen, even without good training on how to avoid detection. The alleys are a twisting network of veins, the streets their bones, and the buildings their flesh. If this was an actual creature, he doubts it would still be alive with the damage done to each of its parts and the viruses that make their homes within its body.

 

Of course, having your city structured like a maze is not good for navigating to any particular spot, but at this point the only people who ever need to know are the customers. Those that are born and raised in this place know the streets by heart, and the constant ebb and flow of whispering is their heartbeat. He wishes he had that kind of familiarity with anything, with a home or even a person. He does not know anyone else's heartbeat, cannot tap it out like a drum beat on the arms of his captain's chair, whether it be the single heartbeat thrum, or the unrelenting chorus of a few of those species that have multiple hearts.

 

He turns left. Goes straight two more passes, climbs up a piece of jagged metal laying against a building and using the windowsills to climb further upward, swinging himself over the lip using the unused florescent bars on the side of the roof. The view from the top of a taller building isn't the most overwhelming sight. Most of the streets and alleys and even some of the shorter rooftops have variously tinted smoke seeping away, gray or yellow, purple or black, it all pushes together into a seamless mass of bruise-colored smog, only the fluorescent purple signs for bars and nightclubs, and the glowing pink rooftop edges of the gentlealien clubs shining through. The six moons rise in a line through the sky, one of the rare nights when all of them align.

 

His cloak pools around his ankles as he sinks slowly to the ground by the edge of the rooftop. It's the traditional black, the same shade and material as a Dealer. It ensures that no organized group will attack him for fear of accidentally leaving something behind and starting a gang war. It's a rough texture, thick and heavy and uncomfortable, a blend that is supposed to keep the street Dealers warm when the nights hit and the temperatures plummet sharply. His breath fogs as he exhales, a dark reminder of what's to come.

 

A purple light flashes momentarily in the distance. That would be the blaster fire then. This place does have one of the higher mortality rates of the Long-Control planets, it's not strictly surprising to see the colorful blasts of light shine up through the mist and smoke. It's a bit like fireworks, really.

 

There's another scream. It rips at tears through the air like a feral animal, clawing the sky to pieces.

 

It's right below him.

 

He tilts his head, taking one arm that was previously wrapped around his knees and placing it on the ground again, just waiting to vault, to move away from the rooftop at the next sign of danger.

 

It sounds again, horrible and screeching, somehow even more desperate than before, and he falters.

 

He remembers making those noises once, before the man his father hired – _didn't even have to decency to do it himself_ – would tell him that he wasn't allowed to fight back until he stopped making noises every time he was hit, that he wasn't allowed to sleep or eat until he stopped making sounds every time he attacked. _A Galra does not show weakness,_ the full-blooded and enhanced teacher would hiss, _and a_ prince _cannot afford to either. Do it again, you useless scum. If you can do this properly, you'll get to eat the scraps with the Yupper tonight. Don't, and you're not even going to have enough for a mouse._

 

He remembers that he didn't make a single noise when he stabbed his teacher through the chest with a knife he took from a crewmember. It had _loyalty_ etched on the hilt and he buried the rune straight through bone and muscle. He took it with him. They never did find who gave the killing blow.

 

He does not hesitate as he vaults upwards and swings on one of the fluorescent bars along the rooftop. He makes a mental note that the layout will be the same as a gentlealien club as he lands as quietly as he can on the windowsill, searching for the quickest and most silent route in. He knows from first hand experience that while he is a good fighter, he is also better with the element of surprise. He is, after all, a half-breed, and he will never have as much brute strength as a properly trained full-blooded Galra. He can only rely on his mind and his ability to redirect and dodge rather than directly block.

 

There is a window with only one board blocking it. He'll take what he can get.

 

It crumbles as he rips at it, his claws making punctures through the soft, old wood as the smell of mildew becomes even more prominent. He slips through the window, leaving his cloak snagged for the sake of better movement. There will be no cameras, and he will ensure that no one will leave here alive seeing his face.

 

The scream comes again. It's a howl now, choking on something, gagging on something, and a sinking sensation in his gut and his own familiarity with the thickness of it tell him that it's blood.

 

"Shut up, _Nameless_." It's a rough female voice, hardened from multiple choking attempts and a lifetime of smoking, "Or I'll shut you up myself, you abomination."

 

It's a muted little whine that answers the voice, and a laugh from a deeper voice.

 

"Aww, little one wanna cry? Good luck doing that without your eyes, whore." There's a ringing sound of flesh against flesh and a crying, low keen. "The little bitch loves it, don't you sweetheart?"

 

Something in him snaps.

 

It's not a gradual process, not a veil that comes over him slowly. He feels cold at the first voice, feels empty. The first words of the second voice make him want to paint himself in blood, but he waits as he scopes out everything around him.

 

No, it's those last few words that make him shatter.

 

He remembers those words, remembers them spoken to him a thousand times, the overwhelming desire to run, to escape, to leave behind his waking nightmare. He remembers the choking feeling of- the violation- the- the-

 

He wants to make them bleed. He wants to make them die with Loyalty buried in their chests.

 

He smiles, wide and sharp, the yellow of his sclera glowing through the darkness. The door slips open easily to let this shade in, this wraith and shadow through the small confines of this mortal world, this illusion of a barrier. The knife slides into his hand as easily as blood and darkness.

 

He takes a single tick to take in the situation. In the corner, there's a pile of shivering blue and leaking red, a female alien with a set of reptilian frills around her neck gathering the blood as it spills. There's two buff creatures, with six fingers on each hand and a starburst of blue scales around their necks, one female and one male.

 

He knows which one he will be going after first.

 

Loyalty buzzes with the energy it has since he coated it in scarlet, and he rushes the man who still has that smile on his face. He slips his blade through the back of the man's head, watching him crumble. The neck would be pointless, given the scales, but the head is fair game. If he wasn't in his bloodlust now, in that state that's existed since his mind was taken from him, he would've probably froze or at least thrown up, but in the void of red and dripping walls, it does not seem to matter. His dagger flashes out again, but the woman is prepared for it, stepping back from the blade's reach. He smiles as it elongates into the curved sword he loves, transforming straight through the outside of her arm. She hisses as she jumps back from it.

 

She rushes, stepping heavily on her left foot as she rushes toward him, grunting as she does. He steps backward too, collapsing Loyalty back down and holstering it as he goes. She has a smirk on her face, her arms raised out and down to box him in in such close quarters.

 

He jumps, using her shoulders as leverage as he pulls out his second favorite weapon, Faith. The luxite wire tightens around her throat as he pulls on the two metal blocks at the ends, glowing amethyst, harshly cutting off her air supply and a purple line around her throat, even through her scales.

 

He secures his grip on the blocks at the end of the wire as he launches himself over her head, yanking downward as he does. Purple showers him, and he lets go of one of the handholds as he rolls out of the way of her falling body. He'll just retrieve Faith later, after he deals with the final presence in the room. Speaking of which...

 

His blood freezes. The neck-frilled woman has the mass of blue and red pressed against her front, a shine of silver around where the neck is.

 

"D-don't come any closer or I-I'll slit her throat!" The frills are fully extended, surrounding the woman's entire face, only serving to emphasize how wide her pupils are blown. Her hands shake around the knife in her hand, knuckles white from gripping the hilt so hard. The worst part is, he knows she's not bluffing. She has the look of a woman who has nothing to lose, and in that moment, he knows he's already lost the shivering, whimpering mess of cobalt and crimson in her arms.

 

So he makes the call.

 

Loyalty snaps into his hand as easy as death, and he throws like there's a god he believes in.

 

It connects perfectly, dead center between the ridges of harder scales over her eyes, and she drops.

 

She is still holding a knife.

 

The girl in her arms makes a choking noise as the blade digs into the center of her throat, stumbling forward and falling to the ground. Some instinct rises up to _protect_ , and he doesn't hesitate to run forward and catch her under the arms, pull her against him and look over the damage.

 

Where eyes might have gone are simply empty slots, not set back far into the skull at all, weeping red. Her throat is a mess, the shallow cut having gotten something serious undoubtedly, and he reaches into everything that the witch imparted onto him.

 

He's usually used Luxite to channel his raw quintessence, but he's on a time crunch, and he can't afford to waste time scrambling for a weapon. He lays her down on the bloodstained floor and presses one hand over her throat and one over her eyes.

 

"I'm sorry." he whispers.

 

Silver and amethyst glow beneath his hands, and the air gains a charge, spiraling around in protective currents. The girl's mouth opens like she wants to scream, but all that comes out is a feeble squeaking, a light growling, mewling sound. She thrashes on the ground, body convulsing at the unnatural touch of a foreign energy.

 

When he removes his hands, there is a purple streak down her nose, and the spaces where her eyes were are smooth and undamaged. Her throat is whole again, the same color as it probably was before it was wrecked by the dead reptilian woman. She gasps for air, taking down greedy gasps, red trails running down from where her eyes have healed over, the stuff already starting to get cold and crusty. He sets her down gently and steps away, despite the needy gasp she makes once his body warmth is gone, quickly walking over to unwrap his garrote from the buff woman's throat and clean it, doing the same with Loyalty. By the time they're both removed, cleaned and holstered, the girl has wedged herself against another corner, as far away from the blood and bodies as she can get.

 

He takes a moment to smile secretly at the little cat ears on top of her head, pulled back in fear and aggression, flat against her bald, scaled head. A reptilian tail wraps around her protectively, similar to how he held his knees on the rooftop.

 

"Hello." He says, dropping to his knees in front of her and gently reaching out a hand, settling it on the ridge of orchid spearing down from somewhere around her neck to her top lip. She freezes for a tick, waiting for the gentle comfort to turn into pain again. It doesn't, and she takes the risk of nuzzling into his palm. He greets it by running two of his fingers over the ridge, making her purr and practically collapse on top of him, and every inch of her skin that touches his feels of _pack, home, pride, family_. "Let's get you cleaned up, love."

 

He picks her up, wrapping her arms around his neck and she flinches into him, the only solid surface around, before relaxing into him, shivering just slightly. He rips the bloodstained, thin cloak from the reptilian woman off of her and pulls it on, taking the thicker black one down from where it's caught in the windowsill, wrapping up the young one. He's not going to go out without a disguise, but he's also not going to let the smaller, thinner member of the pack wear the thinner cloak.

 

He's attacked by muggers a grand total of five times on the way back to his ship, looking like an easy target and carrying a wrapped bundle. By the time he gets back to his ship he has three different colors of blood on his cloak and it has a hole in the corner from blaster fire. By the time he gets back to his ship, he's shivering from the abrupt drop in temperature, and he has eight more deaths by his hands than he did when he first left it earlier that same quintant.

 

He keeps her close. She can't fit in the pilot's chair with him unless he does some very strange maneuvering, but he still holds her close. She reminds him of himself, back when he was young and scared, her arms wrapped around his torso. She looks so tiny, looks like a strong wind would knock her down and the slightest tap would send her into dizzying unconsciousness, her ears perked up just a bit as she clings to him desperately.

 

The ride back to the Oracle is spent with nothing but the constant hum of the engines and the rumbling purr of the broken girl echoing in his chest.

 

-

 

 _"She'll be fine, little one."_ The Oracle says as she returns back from checking on the blind girl. _"She has a very adaptable mind. She won't see through her own eyes or speak with her own voice again, but she will survive."_

 

"Thank you, my lady. Do you know why they had her?"

 

_"She's a quarter Ventossian. They have excellent psychic powers, and their blood has a fascinating psychedelic effect on whoever ingests it. An attempt, undoubtedly, by a few fools looking to corner the drug market."_

 

"Will she stay with you for now?"

 

_"For now, yes. I will teach her how to use her mind properly, how to see without seeing. I have no doubt she will become a great player on the board."_

 

"She is only a _child,_ my lady. She's pac- just a child."

 

_"Children fight wars every quintant, little lord. You were no different."_

 

"She has a chance at a normal life! Do _not_ take this away from anyone else who has a chance, _my lady._ "

 

_"She was born with as much of a choice as you, little prince."_

 

" _Destiny._ Of course. How stupid of me to think any of us could make any sort of difference. Apparently p-packmates aren't excluded."

 

_"Differences are not always positive. She will choose her path, but sometimes every path will lead to the same fate. It would be much more dangerous to teach her nothing of where she will go, tell her nothing of how she will conquer it."_

 

"You are a despicable woman."

 

_"I have never claimed to be otherwise, little king."_

 

He leaves. The Oracle knows he will return. Some, in some distant future, maybe. Maybe to say goodbye, to shoot her in the head and give her a kind of mercy she hasn't felt in decafeebs. Maybe with another lost soul, maybe with a crown heavy on his head or the impending ax of the executioner over his neck, but he will return.

 

He will return for his daughter, his packmate that he found in narcotics, that he liberated with his Loyalty.

 

He will return for Narti.

 

-

 

_"Kova is yours now, my sacrifice. She will guide you to your path, she will be your wayfinder. Come back to me when the sky falls and the little emperor needs his own again."_

 

 

 

 


	2. 2

 

He doesn't know the name of this planet. He probably could find one if he wanted to, but it'd probably be one of those normal, boring ones that date to the past few hundred decafeebs, renamed in the Galran conquest. It's probably something useless like Priorin-3 or Epsilon-5 or maybe even Quasok-2. One of the post-reformation attempts at erasing planet-wide culture was renaming them with 'Empire-sanctioned designations', distancing them from their ancestors. It worked, but it would probably fall out of fashion too quickly to be used widely, especially since some of the planets had a habit of accidentally gaining multiple conquered names as the people on the planets rise up, take back the planet, and get re-conquered again.

 

It was a mega-city planet, but this one must have been recently (re)acquired because quite a few of the tall buildings were bombed out shells of what was probably their former glory. The Overship, more than likely named 'Vengeance' or 'Immolation' or some other vaguely threatening word that he despises, is the same black and gray, fuchsia and amethyst combination of colors that makes it looks like a well-formatted bruise in the sky.

 

He could have checked elsewhere outside of the fortified main city, traveled the countryside, avoided their security and wandered around their agricultural subsection. Maybe he could've stayed there for a few hundred decafeebs, just on the rural sector of the planet, maybe get himself some kind of farm or work as a farmhand, could change his name periodically and put on a few random faces whenever he has to, keep himself isolated in a corner, with just enough social contact to keep himself sane(r) and just enough isolation and usefulness to keep him secure and content.

 

He always thinks of trying out settling down on any of the planets like these, where there's a far larger target for the Galra to focus on, on any of these mildly controlled planets. They would not expect him in their backyard entirely, and it'd be a pain to check every house and every person in every sector that they controlled. Here he has anonymity, he can set up multiple identities up in the server, even though most of them will be the vaguest of imprinted templates, just waiting in the system for him to activate, to give him a backstory, maybe a work visa, if he has a farm, selling himself his own farm, if not, then starting a new life elsewhere on the planet. He wants to, aches to stay in this place with a cerulean sky and dihydrogen-monoxide periodically falling from the sky thanks to the oceans at the poles that make his heart ache for a reason he can't name. It's probably the longing of one of his future packmates.

 

Speaking of packmates, he's not entirely certain what he should expect here. He's a bit disgruntled already, given the effort he's had to exert to keep himself from being stopped or recognized by any of the foot soldiers or the sentries that patrol the streets to quell any hints of insurgency. Unfortunately, the people of this planet, whatever it's called now, probably won't attempt to rise up for a long while, which means he has no chaos he can exploit at the moment. Any of the Planetary Resistance will have gone underground, possibly literally, given that from the copious access covers imbedded in the streets, and the general lack of smell from refuse, they probably have a semi-impressive sewer system.

 

Regardless, he's still not impressed by the Oracle in any way, shape, or form. After she sent his packmate with a tentatively-forming bond out on a pilgrimage for self-discovery, which wouldn't be an issue except that the Oracle neglected to tell him that this was going to happen. At this point, saying that he despises her is too soft a term. But, even with all of that, she still gives him the relevant information he needs to find his packmates. For instance, the set of coordinates that led to this place, with a name attached that didn't actually belong to those coordinates. He didn't exactly care to find the right one, given that it looks like every other main-city planet he's ever gone to, and that she included specific instructions in the packet she handed to him with a busy, bustling, _“You'll needs this, you sorry fool.”_ Before she trained her silver eyes on some distant point in the air and tottered away.

 

The Overship blares out the three-tone signal that screeches into his highly-sensitive ears uncomfortably, signaling that the standard work vargas are over, and any large gathering beyond the alarm was illegal and punishable by a term in the cells, which is really just playing roulette with death given the amount of corruption you'll find in Empire-run prisons. People go missing from systems all the time, whether they be technological or star, and most of the time, either no one cares or they know better than to cause a fuss about it.

 

When he was first learning to be more than a mindless, keening creature, this whole concept of disappearing people first struck him as a strange concept. Not because it was wrong, but because it was so covert. All the suffering he had was immediate, purposeful, and for no reason at all. In a way, he was one of those disappearing faces, the ones that fall out of memory as quickly as they were brought into the light. His suffering was never broadcasted, but never hidden. If anyone who bothered to care looked into his file, they would find incident reports, injury reports, training reports, reports on his punishments, his rewards, his mind, his soul, his progress, his whole life before he left documented down in impersonal, single-spaced lines, complete with the most scientific of ways to portray the suffering of another sentient being with high intelligence, and the frigid, sharp lines of the the characters that spelled not his name, but 'Subject 001'.

 

Really, it's no wonder he is what he is. An empty shell, maybe, but remarkably functional nonetheless.

 

The rest of the packet unlocks as soon as he turns the right corner, the purple, Empire-permitted hologram text floating into the air just in front of him, just a vague shimmer in the air for anyone with a different point of view. _'Kaidaki-althea. Makkeqq Mora. Ask for Mirage.'_

 

He stiffened.

 

First, he stiffened for the language itself. Altean is not common nowadays, at least not in its original form. Given its high adaptability and the widespread nature from the original species being galactic diplomats, despite the banning of the language, it was still the easiest way to cross-species communicate. Thus, Basic was made, as a strange bastardization of Altean, Galran, and seemingly random variations in order to make it acceptable under Empire rule. Altean itself was largely lost, but some societies still practiced it, in the dark corners of controlled worlds, with the Rebel movements that have allied with different pre-reformation insurgent societies on different free or holdover planets from the beginning of the Conquering. Altean in this message, therefore, is both a disturbing reminder of what happens to those the Empire opposes and a callback to his heritage.

 

But it's not the only callback to his past.

 

Kaidaki-althea, the old name for his worst nightmare. First, a few clues. 'Kaid' means daughter, 'daki' is an addition that applies a sexual connotation, and 'althea' is house. He refuses to even think the word it makes, that makes bile rise up in his throat, but grimly, he promises himself that this crime ring will not survive until the star that glitters above him now rises up against the horizon again.

 

Makkeqq is a phrase that makes his blood run cold and hot simultaneously in a strange combination, the fear contrasting with the natural bloodlust that comes when he feels a foe, a challenger to his power. The second of his pack is here, under the thumb of a warlord that undoubtedly makes them do-

 

Enough with that train of thought. He can't afford to lose his focus on this. After all, Faith is on his hip and there is a fire in his eyes now that he would be remiss to leave behind, the red filling in the cracks of his mind nicely as he relaxes into the ruthless state that keeps his muscles loose, keeps his smile sharp and his face hidden, that keeps his eyes clouded and the deaths from weighing down his mind, from exacerbating the crevices built into his psyche already. Loyalty weighs like something heavier than a neutron star on his hip, the cold deadness of it warning him against its use.

 

He looks up.

 

There are clouds in the sky, some of them fluffy and white, looking more like something beautifully soft than the cold, largely intangible form it really takes. Among them, higher up, there are a few iridescent ones, reflecting rainbow light down gently, spreading it out in beautiful colors, fanning out with glimmering, reflected sunlight. The sky above is stained orange, the star shining light harshly into his eyes as he tilts his head to stare hopelessly skyward.

 

The sky looks beautiful, but he's really looking for the fluorescent bars that edge the roof of one of the building around him.

 

This one isn't one of the 'gentlealien's clubs' you find elsewhere. The bars on the edges will not glow pink in foggy nights, cutting amorous swathes through the mist, drawing in men and women and those undefined in with the allure of the rose-tinted bars on the eaves, the siren's call of music and alcohol, drugs and sex. The cerise temptation of a night out with the people on _just_ this side of wrong, with that bite of danger that makes the carpets of the place smell just a bit like blood to the trained nose.

 

No, this is a Kaidaki-althea. This is a brothel for the unwilling but well-behaved.

 

The bars on the edges are tipped with steel and small little pink ribbons. They will glow as amethyst as the windows of the Overship above, will give off that subtle scent of burning things, will not cut through the fog with the same, more innocent way as the bright pink does. The fluorescents will look like the light of a sentry, of a guard, of a blaster fight, of anything related to the Empire. Only the fools and those certain will seek them out when the mist arrives and the lights come flickering on, and only those in the know will come before then.

 

Bile crawls into his throat as he strides confidently below the steel-tipped bars, beneath the pink ribbons that slink down his throat with memories beaten back. He turns his snarl into a predatory smile, something just on the edge of unnerving, stuck somewhere in that uncanny valley between normal and abnormal, in that disturbing bland thing made of teeth and nothing else, dead eyes simply staring with just the hint of murder attached.

 

He knocks. Once-pause-twice-pause-twice-pause-once-pause-thrice. The sense-memory of blood and sweat come back at that signal, the feeling of pain, of being too exposed, too vulnerable, too alone and too crowded, the bruises blossoming on his skin in flourishing rainbows of color, like the clouds above his head. Metal, wood, ground, stone, hollow natural things. The knock was always the same.

 

It creaks open to reveal a woman, dark patterns spilling from the the ridges on the arch of her nose around her crimson eyes, skeletal fingers dancing around the hilts of the collection of knives by her belt. Her posture is that of a confident warrior, her gaze is calculating and aloof, and her very soul reeks of corruption and destruction, of desecration and crimes unspeakable.

 

It feels like breaking every single bone in his body to do it, but he bows, low and slow and deep, deliberately and fancily, using the manners of a native of the species whose face he wears now. It _burns_ to show respect to this creature that has a soul younger, but still almost as cruel as his father. “Rashal-rinat, Makkeqq Mora.” The respectful greeting goes off his tongue like honey, but burns like acid in his mouth, in his throat, in his soul. The Rebulon accent is easily used, the subtle rounding of a few vowels and the strong 'ck' sounds, combined with the countless other little intricacies that form his illusion.

 

“Asoek.” She greets emotionlessly, “What is your business here.” Her voice is deep and steady, a constant drone with light little clicks echoing some of her consonants. It's a monotone, slightly menacing thing, the question phrased like a statement instead.

 

“I was... recommended by an acquaintance here. I heard that Mirage was particularly exhilarating.”

 

“She is our most popular product. We will have to certify you have the GAC. Please, follow me inside. Best not to alert the patrols.” She turns back within and begins down the hallway, not even waiting for his response or acknowledgment, simply walking into the darkness beyond the yawning portal in front of him into another simulation of his nightmares.

 

He steps into the shadows.

 

The room beyond smells of incense and sweet things, the pale undertone of sex and sweat and blood clouded over by the subtlest scent of the cleaning fluid. It's the standard brothel waiting room, something gentle and masking over the distinctive stink of seduction and murder and tampered crime scenes.

 

It's like that doorway, that yawning, gaping thing that consumed him was a portal to the past. The walls are a dark color, maybe black, maybe just a shade or a few off into some other pigment, the floor a dark, hard, impersonal thing. The lights are fluorescent, glowing the same sickening color as the bars on the eaves, and the furniture held at precise, knifelike angles is made of perfectly shaped crystal. There's a bar in the back, made of black stone with a polished surface, bottles glittering behind it in glowing cases silhouetting the decanters in lilac light. The GAC code glitters on his display, and the confirmation glows on the outside for the woman to see. She gives a vague humming grunt of acknowledgment in return.

 

“Wait here. Take a seat if you wish. Do not drink anything.” She walks behind a dark paper screen, and quiet beeping echoes after a few ticks, followed by the heavy sound of a hydraulic lock settling open. The purple edging the ceiling glows down, his own heartbeat loud in the silence of the room. The display on his wrist collapses downwards, the complimenting amethyst light folding down until he's left alone in the dimly lit room that echoes with memories he tried to let go of for a while, until the walls are painted with phantom blood and there are voices hissing in his ears.

 

His skin crawls, and he freezes, drawing his control back, staring down at his glove-covered hands, where he knows dark red of an Arielian is slowly overtaking the lavender that would have started to seep away from his knuckles. He feels his fingertips grow out the heavy black claws again, like pulling his nails out of their beds further, unearthing the unknown extent of the onyx material. The crawling sensation ceases as his skin settles back, the light pain from the transition a berating reminder that he mustn't let his control slip now, not here. There are undoubtedly cameras, watching him, recording him, ready to alert the authorities if he shifts skins, an alibi on the woman's tongue and an accusation in every bit of footage.

 

He waits in a room that he suffocates in, not making a move to sit down, or move around, or even look around at the room that he's in. He can feel the walls around him, the ears that he hasn't bothered to change much catching the light humming of electricity in the walls, the slight burbling rush of the pipes, the wiring for the lights on the ceiling sketching out a vague concept of where every wall is. The drinks over behind the bar, glowing amethyst but humming with electricity that is unlike the quiet, hissing burble of quintessence smell strangely. Some of them are alcohols, exotic, common, good, bad, but he can see why she told him not to drink anything. One bottle in the corner, undoubtedly meant to be served with their heavier alcohols, smells of bitter almonds and sulfuric acid, and there are countless others with various combinations of poison and acid.

 

He waits in the room that reminds him of his childhood for what feels like a varga, but was probably close to only a few doboshes, before the woman with the black marks on her face and soul comes back in. “Up a floor, the door to your left. She'll tell you where to find all of the toys and restraints if you wish them.”

 

He walks through the door she had passed through before, noting the biometric lock and the keypad next to it, as well as the complicated system of physical locks as well as electronic ones. It's a better system than most Galran prisons, and he keeps his lips locked tight to keep whatever is building up behind it (a sob? a scream? bile? Curses?) from spilling out.

 

The door shuts behind him.

 

There are still eyes on him though, little cameras and microphones imbedded in the walls, the ceiling the floor, probably a tracker clipped to him already. Loyalty practically hisses on his covered belt, going cold and dead in a way it hasn't since before he first coated it in blood. He knows, without even looking, that the rune of the hilt that gives it its name will have gone dark and gray, refusing to glow, will weigh down his arm if he tries to use it. Faith will be his only weapon in this place of memories.

 

The door up the stairs and to the right reeks. Of blood and sex, sweat and smoke, alcohol and perfume, drugs and cosmetics, poison and . There isn't the scent of rot in the room, but it stinks of death. This room hasn't gotten the same treatment as the lounge below, but it's been used for the same purpose. It all feels so faked, so staged, so familiar.

 

He opens up the door before he can convince himself otherwise.

 

There is a woman- no, just a girl, lounging on the bed. She is elegant, in a macabre way. Not that she is starved, no, there's a bit too much muscle on her bare frame to have much malnutrition, but her ribs are sharp things, sticking out like the knives undoubtedly hidden behind the headboard. Her eyes are swallowed by the shadows of her makeup, empty sockets so familiar, like the girl on Eltran, the yellow sclera telling of her heritage, while the glowing ice blue is so similar and yet so foreign to his own. She is wearing a wig, a void black thing with the barest hint of a shine, carefully applied to her skull, glued on with something strong. The space over her eyes is coated with something, a heavy layer of the cosmetics she applied, covering something up.

 

She smiles, and it's as sharp as his own, but less brittle. He smiles like a broken window, like the twisted frame of a crashed fighter, she smiles like a sword, like a weapon freshly forged.

 

She takes him in as well, then smiles a bit wider, a bit more casually manic, the dangerous friendly snarl made of teeth, before settling back into a professional facade, standing up from the bed that seems like the source of the smell from the door, reaching out and running a hand that scents of blood scrubbed leisurely out from in between the creases of skin, beneath half-clawed fingernails down his hood. She pulls it back, undoes the clasp around his neck as he stands still, skims the dull sharpness of her fingertips under his jaw, the light touch feeling of the light echoes of _bond, protection, pack._ She smirks just slightly, a twist of the corner of her mouth, biting the other corner with lightly sharpened teeth as a quiet giggle bubbles from her throat.

 

She leans forward, the lack of clothing apparent as she presses the left side of her body to his, the wig tickling his neck as she skims her teeth over the shell of his pointed ear, whispering with the barest of breaths. “My knight out of his skin and in his shining armor. How charming.” She nips at his neck before drawing back, keeping one hand on his wrist as she stares up at him, the electric blue of her irises holding a thousand secrets, the whole of her uncovered skin glowing with the light of the familiar, of the family he seeks to rebuild from ashes.

 

She winks at him, remaining eye flickering off to one side, to a dark ceiling corner that must hold a camera, hand flicking at the table on the side, filled with tiny drawers, probably holding all manners of toys and a mic. “I've heard things about Mirage.” He says, nodding slightly in acknowledgment.

 

“Only good things, I hope.” she returns, the smile returning as a ghost over her lips, an impression he's not sure if he sees or not. “How can this illusion help you today, hmm?” She prances around him softly, feet not making a sound on the hard floor, tossing out suggestions in each ear as she passes around, running fingertips with sweeping motions over his back, his chest, the nape of his neck, his arms, his hips. “What kind of depraved shit do you like, honey? I've got everything for everything.” she says, skimming the pointed shell of his ear with her teeth again, nipping lightly at where they meet his skull. In between the suggestions she tosses out this time, there's little tidbits of information. In between describing just what she wants to do to him in detail, she tells him that there's another mic in the plant in the corner, and two more cameras in the lights.

 

“They'll get suspicious soon.” she whispers in his right ear, going invisible as the wig brushes his neck but doesn't appear in his periphery. It was surprising and a bit terrifying the first time, but he got used to it. “Time to put on a show.”

 

He's stiff as she finally grabs his wrists, leads him to the bed that smells like murder, and he relaxes into the cushiony surface with reluctance, the familiarity of it all suffocating him slowly. “And you seemed so familiar with this setup before...” she whispers in his ear, staring down at him, this false face of hers peering down from beyond the curtain of black hair.

 

He yanks her down from where she straddles him, pinning her underneath him instead, and she smiles with sharp teeth stained lightly with her own blood from before. She bucks up and he leans down to his in her ear, quietly whispering his first hidden message of the night, “I'm more used to being on the opposite side of this arrangement.”

 

She goes still for a second, the smile slipping from her mouth, electric blue shining tremulously. When she surges up again, catching his bottom lip and biting down enough to leave a mark, maybe draw some blood, she drags him back down with her, moving her head to the side to whisper, “Let's make this quick, then, love.”

 

It doesn't make him feel any less dirty.

 

-

 

Loyalty disappeared somewhere in the night, in the negative space between her words and when he fell into a miserable unconsciousness, in the neat pile of his clothes. Faith is gently in his hands, the holds on the side smooth and clinical, as impersonal and cold as what he's done in this place, in this bed. He flicks the end off of the wire with the flick of a switch and the pressure on the ends, spinning it off easily until it's alone on the bedspread, the deep red and black of the tangled blankets, like his fresh blood over his dried. It's sleek and frigid and polished but _lonely_. Separate from the sharpened, glowing wire, it's useless, it's pointless, it probably couldn't even be used to beat someone's head in properly.

 

It's depressing that he can always find himself in his weapons.

 

Beside him, Mirage's breathing speeds up just a tick, then settles back down along with her heartbeat, but he doesn't bother calling her out. He simply picks up the lifeless silver hold and tightens it back on the wire with a careless spin, like the metal in his hands isn't his life, isn't what he kills by, and one day, will most likely die from. It's not the first time he's thought of it, of the wire wrapping around his throat, on setting up a stool and putting both feet over the edge. It's just a bit more visceral now, with the dirty sensation crawling over his skin, the sensation of _pack? family? what?_ the uncomfortable uncertainty of the instincts he belongs to, mind, body and soul.

 

Whatever she is, he was sent here to find her, and he will not back down now. Even if he was inclined to leave her alone, or kill her, he would still kill the monster downstairs. The illusion around him is shaking now, shading into something darker and something lighter sometimes, some patches of skin burning purple before folding back under. The cameras, under his spell, under the influence that feels like something dark crawling from his throat was latching over him, over his pulse points and his temples and sucking all of evidence of living from him, simply show looped footage of them sleeping. Soon, the Makkeqq will arrive for final payment, but he has a few minutes still.

 

Loyalty is gone in this room that makes him feel like he's dying, but he has Faith. He still has his ways to kill that are more elegant than claws and fangs and blood painting his chin messily with the iron in the back of his throat.

 

The darkness rises for him, filling out the empty gaps in his throat until he suffocates, caving over his eyes until he is blind and stopping up his ears until he hears nothing but the lack of his own heartbeat, without the blood rushing through his ears. He tastes ashes and he smells rot, and all he knows is that the corruption is approaching and that the wire, held tightly against his hands, has cut into one of them.

 

It's nauseating to slip into the bloodlust this time, the sick drop of all of his restraints, the freefall as the carefully built walls disappear into formless smoke.

 

He revels in it.

 

The door handle turns, and he is a predator now as he folds out of the bed of fresh wounds with a serpent in his hand made of unrelenting metal, the wire glowing a purple so hot that it's white, like lightning that will last a thousand years, glowing with the light and the darkness of every soul it's snuffed out since he's had it.

 

The one outside the door isn't the Makkeqq, but the soul that belongs to it isn't much lighter than that void, so he has no regrets as the sharp wire meets vulnerable skin, as he tugs smoothly and lets the blood spray. Behind him now, he can hear Mirage throwing off the illusion of sleep, but for him it's just an extra buzzing in his ears now, in his quest to burn himself alive to purge himself of this corruption he feels rotting his skin from his living bones.

 

In all truth, past that, he doesn't remember much of anything, just the mechanical throw and tug, and when they catch on, hiding on the ceiling, molded to fit it, dropping down to loop it over and yank.

 

All he knows is that he comes to painted in a rainbow with the red dripping from the top, Faith's razor wire still burning, changing sizes uncertainly. Given that his skin is itching, but no longer crawling, he'd guess that under all of the blood his skin is lavender again. The cameras are rolling still, recording onto a few servers and all that, but he has a web in his hands of the energy, of looped footage of a card game or something, he doesn't particularly care, but he cares that he has a connection to every single recording device in the building.

 

With a thought, a sense of sick revulsion, and a blinding moment of consuming rage, every single one of them die with a crunch.

 

Mirage is standing by the door, wearing a smooth white robe, the hem stained with the blood it must have dragged in on the trip down the stairs. Her wig is smooth, but she carelessly rips it off and uses it to smudge the heavy makeup layered on her forehead before tossing it to land on the chest of one of his victims. She has a tendril of flesh growing from the back of her head, banded with the same cerulean that colors thickly over her eyes, the same gold in the center of the two that's on the end of the protrusion.

 

She crosses over to the bar, reaching down below the counter and waltzing out with a certain brand of grace while he remains a listless wreck on the floor.

 

She cocks a hip and crosses her arms, looking down at him with one eyebrow regally up, like a queen looking at the dirtiest orphan. In her left hand, there's a meat cleaver as long as her arm, glowing silver in the dim lighting.

 

“Go.” She says, and her voice when it isn't pitched seductively low, or roughly whispering in his ear, is surprisingly high. “I have a crime scene to clean up and you have around twenty crime bosses to run from. I don't have time to deal with your shit.”

 

By the time he finally gets up from the floor with the hesitance of the unrepentant sinner before their god, she's dragged all of the bodies into a neat line, and is lining up her first slice.

 

He won't bother to clean himself up. It's dark out, he's tired, and he wants out more than anything else. He'll walk to his ship covered in the blood of several species, the shadows wrapped around him greedily and the witch's voice in his mind, and he will not be stopped by a single authority, a single mugger on his way there.

 

“Oh, and honey?” he stops by the door, turning his head back, his hair caked in blood and somewhere, probably, there's a little bit of skin, but Mirage doesn't even look up from where she's begun the mechanical disassemblage of a body. “If you ever come around town, feel free to ask around for me. We're family, anyway, hmm?”

 

The door slams open and he tumbles out without any hesitance. Ironically, it's a foggy night, and the lights on the rooftop are glowing subtly, an open invitation. He doesn't bother to go back in to warn her, it would probably spoil her fun.

 

His hand slams out into empty space, the area around his wrist glowing amethyst, and from there upward, his hand disappears. When it emerges out again, his skin is crawling again, the flesh under the glove glowing enough to shine through, and the rune on the side of the knife is glowing more powerfully than ever.

 

He waits until he plots the course back to the Oracle and sets up autopilot to fall apart under the showers.

 

-

 

She smiles as she bags up another body, tying up a nice bow with the strings. It looks pretty now, as she adds it to the steadily growing pile, surveying over the mixed mess of limbs to figure out what mix of parts she's going to toss into the next bag.

 

With the Makkeqq, with _Mamar,_ out of the equation, a lot of operations will go tumbling down. They rely on _Mamar's_ money, on her impartial systems, on her power, to keep themselves running. It's a beautiful power vacuum the man with no name has given this slave, the lease practically signed in the blood on the walls. The chaos leaving it unfilled would cause is appealing, but at the same time, having influence is enticing.

 

What to do, what to do...

 

There's a knock at the door. The smooth thing she's heard all her life, the thing that makes her smile fall into a snarl, melting into something much more insane. She picks up the cleaver from where she left it, by some goons severed hand, and skips down the hallway, to the door she's only gone out of a few select times.

 

It opens under her fingertips, and the bright, glassy blue and yellow glow through the darkness. She's silhouetted by the lights behind her, bright now that she brought in a few lamps from the back room, her features a bit distorted, her teeth sharp and glowing and the tendril curling up an inch above her scalp. The knife in her hand still drips blood, splattering arrhythmically on the tiled floor.

 

She looks like an avenging angel.

 

“I wasn't expecting visitors...” she purrs, twirling the knife and leaning forward casually, showcasing her white robe covered in the multi-colored stains of a massacre. “Oh, please come in.” she makes a mock gesture with her knife hand to inside, where a severed head is perfectly visible from the doorway.

 

“I'm cleaning house after all.”

 

The man in front of her screams, and Makkeqq Ezor _laughs_.

 

 

 


	3. 3

He hates sand. Well, maybe not the nice wet kind he can find in the underwater refuge planets, but he despises the dry kind. It's annoying, getting in the gaps of armor, in between toes, flying up into his face at the most inopportune moments, sucking the moisture out of the air until each breath is almost painful. The heat is almost unbearable, beating down around him and heating up the white of his clothing, the heavy scarf surrounding his head and face, obscuring his features and skin colors, the only few strips of skin visible painted with a brown pigment.

 

The Oracle didn't even have the good graces to meet him in person to give him his next cryptic message, she just sent the coordinates with her unique quantum signature to tell him that it was her and not an impostor leading him into a trap. It's a miserable place, it's hot and it's sandy and he absolutely loathes this planet, this dusty nightmare of a planetoid.

 

There's nothing even remotely fascinating or interesting about it that he's found so far. It is, as far as any records or his current experience tells, nothing but an infuriatingly large dust ball floating around in space. No dune seems different from the next, there's no clouds in the sky, and thanks to it being tidally locked to its star, not even the sun has moved. He almost finds himself wishing for some kind of native beast or a sandstorm, just so something can break the monotony.

 

There's no interesting sounds or smells. The lack of anything to describe it by other than: hot, sandy, and miserable is honestly grating on his nerves. He'd always loved to be flowery with words, loved war poetry and poetic justice, liked to dance around various topics with nothing but his mind and his mouth, charm people with just his wits, make them deceive themselves after giving a nice introduction.

 

He also hated having nothing to observe, to occupy his thoughts while he went. His mind was never really turned off, even in sleep, which was good for strategizing, but when it comes to this kind of thing, this long, tramping, boring journey for nothing in particular on the words of a crazy, blind woman, all it does is shore up old wounds, pick open old scabs, and break him slowly apart piece by piece.

 

He despises this planet with every bit of his soul.

 

The sand, the endless walking, the constant pace that he doesn't feel like breaking sinks into his soul, into his mind, wears him slowly down until he feels like a wild animal again, running from where his loyalty had been stuck, where Loyalty shed her first drops of blood, where his mind had been violated and desecrated.

 

The Galran Empire never appreciated weakness, despised mercy and sentiment, and above all prized conformity, loyalty, the orthodox and the drone-like sameness, unquestioning blind devotion. They required perfection or death. Really, for the Galran Empire, it was always something or death, victory or death, perfection or death, and somewhere in the halls he'd heard _knowledge or death_ whispered behind sentry masks and hands, drilling their way into his ultra-sensitive ears.

 

He was less than perfect. He was utterly unnatural, a failed experiment, an entire project wasted to create a weakling, the genetics of Emperor Zarkon put into such a useless creature. The culmination of a few thousand s of Druid research all down the drain, meant to create the perfect weapon, made to follow in both the Emperor's and the High Priestess's footsteps, to unite church and state, become the absolute, fully immortal, charismatic, brave and strong leader.

 

He was meant to be beautiful.

 

Some he has to wonder that if they hadn't announced that they were creating the Sovereign, if they hadn't announced they were successful in creating life from nothing but a few pieces of DNA and some quintessence, if he would've been dead, if the witch and her followers, or maybe his father would've killed him, maybe dissect him to find where they went wrong. Sometimes, he allows himself to get a ticket onto the train of thought that always arrives at the inevitable conclusion.

 

He has no idea why they didn't kill him. It makes perfect sense that they would be able to claim a lab accident, maybe an outlier in their calculations, and not even the strongest imperialists with the most dedication to first-born inheritance would question it. They could say that it died because it did not process the air properly, or killed itself, give any reason, maybe even 'it wasn't good enough' or 'I felt like it' and the Empire would be lauding the decision from sector to sector.

 

Maybe the ties of family? But no, neither of them particularly care if he suffers, what he suffers, even by their own hands. No bonds between a pack would ever be strong enough to combat the true hatred of those he was raised with. He was a brood parasite, and they treated him as such. Unfairly, in his opinion. It's not his fault they decided to bring a mistake into the worlds.

 

And as for family, anyway, he has only ever had four and a three quarters, about. The girl on Eltran-5 is pack, yes, but if she does not want to be recognized as it he will not make her decision for her, and as for Mirage, she is reluctant and scheming and insane, stuck in the dangerous rift between supporter and extorter. The Oracle, no matter how much he hates her, is pretty much his deranged grandmother, his father can get fully digested by a horde of Weblum for all he cares, and the mere thought of the witch, of her name and her corrupted, sickly kindness, makes him feel like he's drowning in this desert. The only one he considers full family and does not despise is the woman who began the project that resulted in his creation. An Altean fully dedicated to the Galran cause, or so the history books say at least, one Mistress Honerva, an Alchemist and a Scientist. He admires her scientific initiative, her experiments and their results, her focus on the natural mind, rather than the brute strength of the common soldier, the ruthless politics of his father, or the unnatural corruption of the pure essence of the world as the Druids.

 

He hates that he knows how to use all four, but does not particularly shy from it either. Well, except for that last one. He uses it as plausibly as any mildly sensitive Galran soldier might, to enhance weapons, create disguises, and to his pack, fully form the bonds and heal. Never more than that. Any more and he has to listen to the remnants of the sticky sweet, rough voice of the witch echoing through every layer of his mind until nothing was sacred, nothing was untouched, and he is left maybe half a dobosh of any actual outside activity before he collapses into a shivering pile on the ground, stuck in his haze for anywhere from a few ticks to a quintant or two.

 

Somewhere in the outside, detested world that makes him fall into his mind out of habit, he picks up the sound of metal ringing against rock, and he distantly smells unfamiliar sweat and the rolling stench of a group of unwashed bodies. It would disgust him, but he's already fully revolted with the mere thought of the witch, so it doesn't quite matter.

 

In the distance, there is a muffled scream, and the slick crack-snap of a whip hitting bloodied scales.

 

Maybe, if he was on a crowded city planet, if he was in a populated area, he would've kept walking in a different direction, trying to wipe the sound out of his mind, trying to run away while he killed his demons.

 

Here, there will be no consequences for his actions. He's checked every database, the main Galran and the dark Galran one included, even what he could find from the data banks he does not assign a name to, but knows are rebel based. This planet, whatever exists on it, does not exist in the eyes of anyone who will care enough.

 

For the first time in a long time, he can do something without fearing the consequences.

 

Loyalty is in hand before he can even think, the familiar weight of the blade pressing into his palm making him calmer and more angry simultaneously, balancing into a cold, heartless, ruthlessness. It's a familiar haze of red that overtakes his vision, that relaxes him in comparison to the overtaking of a black veil or an amethyst wave crashing against his mind. It is comfortable for him, because it is his, undeniably. It comes when he bids it, and not before then.

 

The dunes rush under his feet as he slinks forward like some desert snake, like some bizarre beast with a single metal claw, hunched and baring sharp canines, yellow creeping in around the blue of his iris, the armor glinting just barely in the heavy sunlight, like the shine of dripping venom from white ivory fangs.

 

There is a camp under the shadow of the dune, a few pitched tents and lines in the sand that have been so recently trod upon by so many feet that the indentations are still visible. The size of the tents to the amount of footprints is concerning, which means either there is reinforcements, another camp close enough by, or there's a few more sinister connotations than he thought.

 

The noise and the scream sounds out again, and the scarlet comes for him.

 

There is a crowd, and blood in the sand. There is a form crumpled against the post it is tied to and it is blue and red and his mind can't stop screaming. There is a man standing tall and proud with a bloodstained whip in hand and a sick smile on his face, and there is something cold and dark in his veins now.

 

The blue figure coated in red is reptilian, just like the Eltran Girl. The only difference is that the end of the tail is barbed, and this one has eyes, wide and crazed with fear. On the opposite side of the post, tied to it, is a girl, squirming and hissing at her captors, black horn-like things sticking up sharply in front of her face like spider legs, dark blue hair coated in sand and gummy with congealed blood.

 

He burns in his mind, but he observes first. There are seven combatants as far as he can tell, two of them with just their swords, three with a dagger on their belt and a blaster in their hands, one with just a blaster, and the final the one with the whip in hand and a dagger by its side. The rest, guarded by four of the combatants, are submissive and afraid, and there are a few covertly snarling faces among the crowd. There are chains around their wrists, linking each of them to one another, and he feels bile raise in his throat.

 

The combatants are only two species, their prisoners not nearly as much. Both swordsmen, the whipper, and one of the dual wielders have thick-looking skin with pieces of rock imbedded, probably as a rite of passage or something pointless like that, with ears the rough size of dinner plates that curl over to protect the tops of their heads from the harsh sunlight. He pats Faith on his side, sending a silent apology since he won't be using it for most of this fight, and makes a mental note to go for the eyes. The other three are something tall and large, with thick, tightly knit hair and perfectly white skin, with no extra natural protection.

 

The one with the whip raises it again, and the sky laughs.

 

He moves like the snake that he is, slipping forward on lightning-quick feet, one luxite-tipped glove glowing as he sinks his claws into this creature's arm the other taking a quick slash across the face, which seems a bit less armored than the rest of the body, hoping to get a lucky hit to blind him. The claws snatch the whip away, while Loyalty flips the dagger out of the enemy's belt and into the sand. He has a split tick that uses to maneuver his injured and now weaponless adversary in front of him before the blaster fire comes raining down.

 

The body he holds in front of him jerks and goes still at the onslaught and he feels something hot and sticky running over his gloves, the heat melting through the fabric at the joints. Some sprays onto his arm and when he looks, it is thick and black, like tar.

 

He hears footsteps coming, so he drops his meat-shield and rolls away, sprinting for the few tents and ducking behind the nearest one. There is a whistle of wind impacting against a solid surface behind him, and he makes a mental note that the swordsmen are not entirely incompetent. In fact, he muses as one of them punctures the tent perilously close to his head, they are quite good at what they do.

 

Loyalty glows in his hand as he dances around the side of the tent, not transforming yet, just glowing with the signature, menacing amethyst of the Empire, hissing through the air threateningly, nicking the arm of the swordsman and humming even louder and brighter at tasting the tar-like blood. The sword comes at him heavily, and suddenly he is much more secure in his victory before. These fighters may have good teamwork, and very good form, but they lack finesse. Again, brute strength versus brains. Brains, unless severely outnumbered or with a concussion will typically win out.

 

Step back, to the left, duck down just barely, sway to the right and _lunge_...

 

Perfect. Blood sprays again, but he cannot either revel or reflect on the life he's just taken, before there are more footsteps rushing him on the sand and he has to spin to block the sword heading straight for his head. Faith slips into his hand, and he clings to one hold, swinging back just barely before sending it flinging forward, the glowing wire cutting through the top layer of skin, the momentary pain distracting enough for the lesser fighter to falter in keeping their blades locked. It's a mistake he does not hesitate to capitalize on, as he whips Faith away and lengthens out Loyalty as he disengages it, dropping low to kick out his opponents legs and sending Loyalty after.

 

He only has one of the heavily armored type to worry about now, which made this self-imposed mission much easier to complete. He wipes Faith and Loyalty on the cloths that the now-corpses wore, painting the fabric with even more blood. Four more to go.

 

He doesn't know how much time he will have to prepare for the next assault, but he still takes a moment to gag up bile into the sand next to him before he takes a look beyond. The white alien without a blade is kneeling by the corpse of the one with the whip, barking out orders that he can't quite hear with his own blood buzzing in his ears and the blood of another painting his hands. No one is in direct danger yet but him, and he feels unfocused for it. Untethered. He doesn't quite have a singular purpose right now, doesn't have a real reason yet. He feels vulnerable in every way that he hates, and the crimson comes for his vision.

 

He feels his body move as if from a distance, a quick sprint, a sliding against the sand that kicks it up into the scarf that covers his head, but thankfully not his eyes, a step to some direction that he doesn't know, a dying gasp. Golden blood is as hot as any other, he reflects, as he snaps into reality with it coating his forearms and a few droplets sliding down the portions of his face still visible, probably taking the largely dried brown skin paint with it, painting the light lavender underneath with the copper-gold fluid. Three more left, and no time to gag off to the side.

 

He has Faith in hand in the next tick, is flicking the switch and twisting it just right to disengage one of the ends as it glows a purple so bright it's white, extending outward into a whip to latch onto the leg of the last of the rock-like species, dragging it toward the two body pile and the beast that's killed them both with a razor sharp grip on the thick skin of its leg. He can feel the other two rushing toward him, but he needs to finish this, needs to kill the one who controls, kill the one that holds him, that holds them that holds them all captive. (He's free, he knows, somewhere in his head, but he's falling now, falling into that place the witch placed him in so many decafeebs ago.)

 

Loyalty is in his hand before he even thinks of it, plunging down and down, again and again until the thing under him stops moving, stops screaming. He must look like a mess now, all feral and wild, armor glinting in the sunlight and scarf messily wrapped around his head, hair probably slipping out into the open, face paint wiping off with the sweat and the blood, his entire body painted in the colors of taken lives.

 

The remaining two, the white-skinned dual wielding ones drag him away from the bodies, cast Faith and Loyalty off into the sand and clasp his hands behind him with their cuffs. He would be relieved that he's been removed from the fight, from his bloodlust, if he did not know why he was brought here, if he didn't know that somewhere here, there is supposed to be one of his new family, that these _creatures_ have hurt one that he will one claim as his own.

 

They hiss words to him in languages he knows and he snarls back, he thinks. Maybe with words, maybe with nothing but the savage noise burning in his lungs, but there is noise and it is not all in his head for once. Surfacing is difficult, and when he does, the blood isn't cooling but it's drying to him in the hot sunlight, and the ones on his face feel like tear tracks.

 

“How did you find this place.” One of them hisses to him, and he can feel the echoes of an Everall accent in the way that form the 'o' sound, the incredibly clipped 'd' that makes the way they say 'did' more like a single heartbeat.

 

“I was told to come here.” He says, straight-faced and screaming inside.

 

“By who, Marmoran scum. How did your superiors find this place.”

 

There is a question on the tip of his tongue now, because he does not know the word Marmoran but he knows it is him. He does not think of the answer, just spits out, “Go ask Delphi.” Which is strange, because in his life, he has never heard of any Delphi. His eyes dart to the side, and he looks at the crowd of slaves. The two that were chained to the post must have been released by their compatriots because they're among the crowd now, the one that's still coated in blood being held up by the other. She meets his eyes, the two blues and yellows meeting each other over the sand.

 

The hit from one of his captors is not strictly surprising, but it's unexpected enough to whip his head to the side, abrupt enough for him to bite down on the side of his tongue. It stings, the taste of his own blood filling his mouth, and he spits it into the face of the thing in front of him. The next hit is obvious, and he does not bite his tongue. He knows there will be two matching bruises when he gets out, and hopefully those will be the last two. He's not ignorant enough, though, to expect that they will be the last.

 

“Answer the question, rebel scum. Or we'll make you answer.”

 

He sneers back and doesn't make a sound. His eyes flicker off to the side, stealing a glance at his weapons in the sand, then glaring back up at the white-skinned monsters before him. He will have a limit of five ticks total to pull this off, which takes away the least painful method of doing it. He had hoped that he would never have to do it again, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

 

He sends a prayer out to the cruelty of Vakyr, and _moves_.

 

He surges forward, headbutting the thing in front of him in the nose and slipping between the gap the two men made when the injured one stumbled away slightly. He rushes toward his weapons lying in the sand, and _yanks_. His arms go up his back easily, but stall somewhere around his shoulders, and here comes the more painful part. They go over his head with the sick crack of bone, the burning sensation of an arm popping out of the socket and back in almost simultaneously, and the upper part of his left arm feels more painful than the other one, which means he's probably either cracked or broken it. That's fine, he's had to work with less before.

 

He yanks his wrists apart sharply, breaking the bond between them and snatching Faith off of the ground, since Loyalty is a few more steps away and he doesn't trust his weak arms to properly use the blade. The garrote hold is next to it, but he doesn't have time to reattach it properly, so he'll be using Faith as a whip against the slavemasters.

 

He did mention that he liked poetic justice.

 

The red comes again, and he does not panic. He's killed enough to for him to stop caring when it comes for him again. In the haze, on the edges of the misty world when he realized that he's taken lives that can never be given back, he will be afraid, he will be vulnerable. Entering the world however, he has no qualms for death.

 

Faith shrieks in his hand, humming in the blood it's been christened with too many times, gold painting the perfectly forged metal in beautiful, rushing waves. His shoulders ache horribly, and his left arm is screaming as he yanks on the end of the wire, handily separating the head from the white-skinned creature's shoulders, but unfortunately cutting through his glove as well, going all the way through his skin.

 

Then there is a gun to his head and Faith is in the sand again, painting the grains gold, but he isn't down from his crimson high yet, and he hasn't gotten the satisfaction of a pack bond. All he has is the dried blood he's stolen, black and gold and covering him, the red of his that runs down his chin and drips from his left glove.

 

The metal isn't cold against his head really. It's warm from blaster fire, which is a bit of a disappointment, he'd honestly assumed his life would end as coldly as it had begun and been spent, if it was taken before he gave it in the way he hunted for.

 

Does he have regrets now? Maybe, he supposes. That he didn't save the Eltran Girl earlier, that he didn't keep her from the Oracle's clutches. Maybe that he didn't leave his first home before the witch came for him, or that he never took down more than just a few of the base ships when he did escape. Maybe that he survived this long, maybe that he ever existed.

 

There's a spray of blood on his shoulder. It's not his.

 

There's a pause, a shaky breath, and then there's another spray, a grunting scream behind him that's far too shrill to be the last creature's. The gun against his temple goes slack, and he rolls out of the way before the corpse goes down.

 

He raises his eyes up to meet matching yellow and blue, and horns like obsidian arcing around pupils blown wide

 

Loyalty drops from her nerveless fingers and into his waiting hand, and the metal sings of _pack_. She stares and stares, and her hands are covered in gold, her face flecked with little pieces of it as she starts to tremble.

 

It's _beautiful._

 

When she surfaces, vargas later, by the time he has taken her and all of the other slaves back to his ship to take them off planet, she just stares at him for a while. Then she takes the blood on her skin, the stuff that's hers and still oozing out of some of the cuts, and paints a crown on his arm. It's messy, a child's drawing, but she stares at him meaningfully, and her horns clamp down around her head as she bows it in the strangely graceful tilt of her neck.

 

Without a word, he reaches out a hand that glows purple against her cut. When his hand leaves, it's gone.

 

-

 

“How will they be.”

 

“ _Extreme dehydration and malnutrition, a quite impressive amount of psychological problems, quite a few crippling wounds that healed to long ago to get fixed. Speaking of which, I understand you like your way of getting out of handcuffs, but understand that you should_ not _heal freshly broken arms with quintessence. Improperly healed arms are an issue, and though you did set it first, even slight things could have long-term consequences for such an active swordsman as yourself.”_

 

“I will ignore your thinly veiled jabs at my own incompetence, you horrible creature. And please, for the love of Arkien, define 'impressive amounts of psychological issues' because that is a very large sliding scale.” He's glad he never introduced her to Mirage.

 

“ _I don't typically care for ex-slaves, but suffice it to say I've only seen two other people with more than Acxa, and one of those was you. Before you ask, I'm the other.”_ Very, very glad.

 

“And how will my pac- my packmate be.”

 

“ _She wasn't treated as bad as the others, I suppose. Small, good enough at following orders and menial tasks, not enough of a reason or motivation for slapping her around. This was her first time at the post apparently.”_

 

“And mentally?”

 

“ _Her species forms strong emotional attachments it seems too, though theirs are a bit less preemptive than yours. She'll be sticking with you for the rest of her natural life, which thanks to you, is going to be as long as you hold favor. You've played yourself, I'm afraid.”_

 

“Go die in Mikora's fires, you scum. Speaking of that, one of the slavers called me something. Does 'Marmoran' mean anything to you?”

 

There's a wheezy laugh. _“That's for me to know, and you to find out. Now go take your newest packmate to the stars, I have to go check on her friend. Regin or Tefris or something like that.”_

 

He leaves with Acxa this time, and inside of her house where the slaves will heal and go on to commit the heinous act of change, the Oracle makes her own funeral arrangements.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh, guess who had to evacuate? SoCal fires are scary.


	4. 4

“Why am I here?” He says boredly, fingertips tapping on the ceramic of the cup the Oracle had given him, the sides warm but not uncomfortably so with whatever mysterious liquid is inside. He wouldn't know what it is, partially because whatever it is, he's not drinking it.

 

“ _Oh, I'm sorry.”_ The Oracle says in that unspeaking way of hers that's not quite in his head and not quite in the world, _“Is it too much for me to want to see you?”_

 

“Yes. You don't care much for sentiment, in case you've forgotten. Who knows, maybe you've finally gone senile, you old bat.”

 

She shrugs and hums noncommittally, taking a sip of whatever beverage she has in her cup. She lets him stew in silence for a bit longer before she sighs and sets her cup off to the side. _“You know of what I am, yes?”_ He shakes his head, _“Good, it's best you didn't know at all. I'm fairly certain even I've forgotten. The fare for the favor of Faevro's favorite is a frightful fee. You forget where you come from, who you were, your name, yourself, which reality you're in. It's fascinating, really. Eventually you succumb to madness, but I like to think I still have some sanity left. Not much, I don't think, but enough.”_

 

“Why are you telling me this?”

 

“ _Because you're supposed to listen. I had a family like yours once. Much more functional at first, of course, but we had bonds similar to yours. I don't know what I was, or their faces, or their names, but I know their bonds. We were family.”_ She laughs like the creaking doors of an ancient tomb, wrapped up in dying vines that struggle to keep the spirits within from escaping. _“And then one of them got one of our bloods on his hands, and he broke. I look at you, and I see him. I see him realizing the deaths he caused, watched him tear himself apart. He tore us apart too. Took us into all of our pieces and flung us away. I was just lucky enough to land whole.”_

 

“Is this some long, absurdly convoluted metaphor to tell me to let go of my _pack_? You sick woman, you know nothi-”

 

_**I K N O W E V E R Y T H I N G** _

 

Her eyes are glowing now, their silver edged with green like leaves in snow and ash, her teeth bared in a snarl and the ancient, faded red tendrils around her face lashing around dangerously. In the next second, she's calm and composed again, the green fading away from the edges. _“And no, I'm not telling you to run from your pack. Simply a lesson of history repeating, I suppose. You are not him though. You know the weight of the blood on your hands. You don't let yourself forget it. You aren't as stupid as he was, falling for that woman.”_

 

“T-then why am I here?” He's not proud of the stutter, but the raging she-demon of a few moments ago had folded up so completely it leaves him unbalanced.

 

“ _To greet the rest of your pack. Your little Acxa is out running an errand right now, I thought it might be better if she didn't have to join you. Don't worry, we'll both be seeing your little Narti soon, and I made a delayed inquiry for your friend on the planet of blood. You'll be together soon enough.”_ She sets her cup off to the side and gets up from her chair to shuffle into the kitchen, rooting around in her cabinets, _“I hope that after all of this is done for, you'll get me a lovely gift. It's what I deserve, don't I, little king?”_

 

“What-”

 

There's a prick in the side of his neck and he stiffens as something floods into his veins. The illusion in the kitchen that smells of the old earth and ancient tomes dissolves, and it transfers to the figure behind him.

 

“ _I hope you know I regret this.”_ He lurches up from his position even as whatever's in his system starts to shut it down, scrambling on his belt. Loyalty is gone again, joined by Faith in that space between worlds, between words and breaths and blinks and heartbeats. His is slowing down just a bit more as the edges of his vision start to fizzle out.

 

He is falling, he is failing, he is living and he is dying and he is suffocating slowly.

 

“ _Her name will be Zethrid. Don't die until you find her, please. It's not what the visions want.”_

 

And then he is out.

 

-

 

The stars are amethyst tonight. They paint themselves along the dark vaulted ceilings of the heavens in bright streaks, with the cold metal below him growing like grass to tenderly wrap around his wrists. It is a cloudless night, but there isn't a moon in the sky. He must be on one of those planets then, one without a moon, one without the little half-stars in the sky glowing down.

 

The air smells like- like-

 

_blooddeathashscreamspainrotinfectionrustmetalblastersfurscalesquintessencesweatdirtrage_

 

The Pits.

 

He swings upward with a snarl, launching himself forward. He's stopped by the chains around his wrists binding him to the wall, wrenching his shoulder uncomfortably with the sudden motion. His head swims, and his tongue feels heavy and dry in his mouth, but he stares out from half-lidded eyes. There's thick bars, haloed with the characteristic heavy purple light, crackling and snapping with sparks that splash haphazardly around the bars, hissing like a thousand beasts. There's a skin tight dark jumpsuit over his skin, laden with trackers and a shock control chip on the back of his neck that works dubiously. The dark purple shirt he wears is torn and ragged, holes from sword and blaster fire marking him as an unranked slave.

 

Everything smells like blood. Thick iron and copper and the unique scent of death, of the microbes feasting on the ready source of nutrients in this sparse, sanitized world. It's all half-heartedly washed and sterilized, but whatever they use isn't strong enough to keep the scent from permeating through everything.

 

For the first time in so many years, he feels betrayed.

 

He laughs bitterly, a dark chuckle that rises up from his throat with the bile, that grows and crawls and festers until he is howling with laughter, shaking with the tremors with his hands chained to the wall, the metal biting into his wrists like fangs, just on the side of tight enough to keep circulation without allowing anyone to escape from the shackles.

 

It's a hollow feeling, this disgust that rises up for himself, taking away his mind and leaving behind a shell of nothing but useless emotions. Revulsion rolls down his spine, not for the Oracle, but for himself for ever trusting her. He once thought she was pack, a shining bastion of kindness, the sort of generosity he had only ever heard of in myths transferred in the gap of mind to mind. Only after he left, changed his skin and wandered outside the door, did he realize that this kind of goodness was in most beings. He felt lied to, felt confused, and he got sloppy.

 

Mirage's face flashes through his mind, swimming up and staying just slightly submerged as a watery copy of the original memory, looking as she did in her half-goodbye to him, makeup smeared all over her face, the light of fresh freedom burning in her eyes and flecks of blood riding high on her cheeks, swathed over the white of her robe and the burnt orange of her hands. He looked like that to, when he came stumbling back to the half-kindness of the Oracle, of her 'protection', of her good graces.

 

Betrayal feels... strange. It's a sticky, revolting sensation, sliding down his spine and nesting just below his sternum, with the bile and blood and poison. It's disgustingly content where it sits in his stomach, latching onto his sharp edges with even sharper fangs, sticking itself to his waking thoughts with the viscous, churning sensation of it.

 

Little shards of glass have imbedded themselves in his throat, tiny crystallized pieces of the sensation that ripples through him, that send his nails clawing at the flesh of his palms. He thinks he might have been screaming for the indeterminate time between the realization and the ghost-like apparition of a present, the sound echoing through the harsh, dirty lines of the cell and falling on his deaf ears. He can taste blood, in his mouth, in the air, scent it in the crevices of this prison, the spectral imitations of a massacre and the morbid.

 

He is not in his skin, but he is not in a skin of his own either. It's even lighter than the pale lavender he usually wears, the unadorned, unscaled smoothness that makes him despicable. It's almost white, just a shade off into slightly better than a mindless creature, but much worse than any compatriot or, Vakyr forbid, a captain. There's the heavy weight and sensation of another reach of himself that he isn't used to that extend from his scalp, swaying just slightly with ever tremor that resonates from that beast in his stomach, that wracks his form with the quakes that precede a collapsing planet.

 

Is he laughing or screaming again? There are such perfect echoes in this room, beautiful acoustics to amplify the harmony of torture of murder, of suffering and killing, of the degradation of a soul. The stomping boots of the mechanical sentries against the metal floor are heavy in his ears now, the singular sound wiping out the scent of blood and the taste of rot. In the far distance, with the thudding base of the sentinels feet, there is a crowd roaring and screaming, and all around him there is the burbling hum of quintessence hissing through the walls, the map of twisting leviathans made of white-hot lilac, the rush of adrenaline and the instant outreach of his own betraying instincts reaching out to drink in the substance.

 

He feels like a junkie, shaking against a wall, so close to that final dose, to that one last one, he promises, he swears.

 

In his stomach, that creature swims, and the walls around him laugh to the pale echoes of the deathless mob.

 

-

 

They come for him when the streaked stars that light his cell are dim, and his shoulders give the low-burning ache from being kept in position for so long. It's a single foot-soldier, flanked by sentries, and the negative space of Faith and Loyalty burn holes in his hands for the lack of them, sharp reminders of his lack, of his loneliness that destroys him piece by piece with the grace of a wild animal rampaging.

 

He lifts his head to snarl, to pull back his teeth in a sharp, grim show of defiance. The control chip sparks warningly against his neck, a waterfall of tiny ripples running down his spine with the silvery glint of warning, teeth in the far-off shadows, eyes glowing through distant darknesses. He growls with the beast in his abdomen, the creature that taunts him even now, snaps his teeth and knits his mouth shut into perfect silence.

 

The waterfall rushes into a roar, and the purple-white-wrong-light takes over his vision, locks up his muscles, swims through his mind like it belongs to it instead. Distantly, something is howling like death itself, like a tempest in a bottle, like the creatures between the voids between the worlds. Thunder is the footsteps as the lightning in his mind strips itself away slowly with every leeching strand, takes away this blindness of his with long-fingered hands, the ancient, hissing voices he knew before he understood what the world was like without the ghosts in it.

 

He thinks, in this place of the endless storm, of the gods. Somewhere, in this darkness, Seltaix lurks, the chaos and discord xe brings as assured as Meister's promises. Somewhere in this light Mikora laughs and laughs at him, the lightning-stars zey bring lighting the scars somewhere where his skin is no longer his.

 

He thinks, that in some other world where he isn't what he is now, even just the slightest, he would've been a devout creature. He would've worshiped them with his breaths, with his silver and death and blood, with his songs and honeyed words, with the gentleness that he does not know now. He worships Vakyr and her daughter now with the vague detachment of a prayer for a lost friend, a vague thought sent out for the protection of someone you once knew, a kind of longing for what could've been and what might be. He believes in the sanctity of the concepts they lord over, of the crossroads and change, of the choices and the consequences, he believes in them as the inconstant constants of his life.

 

He thinks, and in some other world, if he was any better, he would've followed Mikora and her brood with a certainty he lacks now. He would've fallen in love with the potential eventualities and the sharp blood of justice, would've been entranced by the concept of a moral code, of the righteousness of a good man. Maybe he would bless his blades in a temple flame, would kill with some form of regret, would whisper prayers at night and bless the fallen. Maybe he would've been too good, though. Maybe he would lose himself in his own piety, in his own virtue, and the universe would laugh as it killed him.

 

He thinks, with the blood that lies beneath layers of skin, that sings of the edge of the things he lives by, that coats the back of his throat, that if he were any worse than he is now, he would be absolutely disgusting in his worship. He would follow the life cycle of every being, not from beginnings to crossroads to fate, but from chaos to choices to calamity. If he were worse, he would enslave countless worlds in the name of his god of anarchy, he would convert the masses until their minds were shot through with holes he put there, until he was the lord of the burning, endless void of absolute discord, until the stars ruptured and spewed their putrid light all over the corpse he has made the starways.

 

He is glad of his choices. He is not unrepentant, but he is not repenting either. He will regret his life, his choices, the broken pieces that make him into a being, but he will not find anyone who will ever forgive his decisions, ever reverse them, so he will not seek absolution. He'll confess to anyone who wants to hear, spit the words with the venom in his stomach, scorch his throat with every self-condemnation until he has burned himself from the inside out, but he will never want their pity or mercy, they are not things he deserves. He deserves to be broken, to be torn apart limb from limb, but only by those that deserve to do it to him. He will not let these monsters who made him into one of their brood take him apart, will not deprive those who need vengeance by doing it himself. He deserves the pain given by the shattered saints with their hemorrhaged halos, not by the demons in these halls, not by the angels with their impassive judgment, but those that have fallen from grace to be mortal, because of him or anyone else.

 

He wants to suffer for their sufferance, wants to take the pain they have for his own, wants to wash away their agony with the blood of a sinner's, wants to give them the closure they deserve, to drown their sorrows with his scarlet. He has yet to find anyone other than other brands of demons that want to make him suffer, make him bleed, make him die.

 

The lightning sparks from where it cages over his vision, runs its sick shudders through his body before ceasing.

 

The sound is immense, rising from a dark place he has not known in the eye of this bottled storm, the screams and roars and chants, the voices that burn his mind, that spear him through with the piercing uproar of a mob wired to cheer blood, to live off of the colors that stain the sand with an artist's vision. The leviathans in the walls cheer too, as they clamp down behind him, sparking with electricity, they scream and roar as if they smell the substance in his veins spilling against them, as if they sense they will be fed with the death in these walls.

 

The stands surrounding the steel walls are a churning, roaring sea of purple, a thousand shades in ten thousand bodies, all screeching their roaring approval, matching his cold trance of the demons in his soul with a lust for blood that spills over, lapping the edges of this arena he's been placed in, leaves their crushing masses with a resounding howl that cuts through thoughts smoother than any forged knife.

 

The energy gate behind him has closed, locking him in with whatever waits on the opposite side of the ring, and next to him is a crude blade that looks older than the Conquering, looks like it would crumble at the slightest provocation. He spares a thought that roars loud enough to be heard over this senseless overwhelming noise that drills through his ears to damn those that put him in here, before dragging himself out of the sand and pulling himself to his feet, snatching the corroded blade with a careless twist of the wrist.

 

The material sings to him in a way that Loyalty had when he first picked it up from that faceless comrade's room, when it gave him a lullaby, a soothing thing that sent enough of his mind to sleep that the cold bloodlust rose up unopposed. This one has none of that childish naivety though, none of that playful innocence that guided it to him as something foreign and so very curious. This blade sings of the destruction and death it has wrought, the fire and subjugation it has witnessed and caused, weaves the tales of the time before the Conquering, of its forging, of its faceless creator and the thousand souls that have gripped its hilt, that have died holding it, or died from the lack of it.

 

Without a second thought, he swings it through the pillars of energy and quintessence behind him, cutting a clean slice through it that heals in the fraction of the moment after the blade has passed through it. The corrosion cleans away nicely, showing the vaguely glowing blade below, shining with absorbed quintessence. It's a Luxite compound, and it would be a shame to waste it, to break it and its chain of victories and losses and survivals, through war after war on planet after planet, kissed by the starlight of a million stars, blessed and christened with countless shades of blood it has drawn over the canvasses of the souls it has taken and wounded. It has a history that echoes through the metal, a history that is imbedded in its winking glint, the little flashes of light that tell of the secrets he does not know from this creature of a weapon.

 

He won't name this sword, he thinks. It has a larger history than the youth of Loyalty, he has no claim to it like he does to Faith. He will not be the first to shed blood with it, and he has no doubt he will not be the last. He feels almost cold now, almost dead, and there's a quick thought that he has for the Oracle, for where she sits now, probably drinking that disgusting brew of hers and watching him from lightyears away with her unseeing eyes.

 

He can feel the tendrils of the bloodlust forming now, cold and slick as they drag him slowly down by the roots of his hair, drag his head back into the sticky waters until he is drowning in it, losing every last corner of his mind to the most natural invader it will ever have. This is the humming sickness that will probably get him killed eventually, the living, breathing monster that even now crawls up from its home in his stomach, crooning and hissing and dripping its venom down.

 

The crowd is roaring impossibly loud now, as he slips into this internal skin of his, the killer, the thief, the murderer, the warrior, the demon, the gladiator. Whatever is across from him is impossibly large, a massive, hulking creature that feels far too sure of itself. It has the collar of a Favor latched tightly around its neck, marking it as both a veteran and favorite, as well as keeping anyone from getting any easy neck shots. It's a vague blur as he swings the nameless thing in his hand, swirls the blade through the air like a showman, like he doesn't want to leap forward now, to destroy and kill with every bit of savage grace he has in his body.

 

The noise crescendos, a wild roar as the distant blur through his unfocused eyes lopes forward with a heavy, loud, grunting step. He will not feel satisfied after the blood is spilled, he knows, will not be happy with this new death he has created. He will pace like a monster in a cage, just waiting to be sprung. He will hate with every fiber of his being, will hiss and spit and destroy, will not be Favored, but will be the favorite. He will be the disgusting beast they thirst for, the creature of black destruction they howl for up in their distant seats, in their own little places of nobility. He will be small and fast and burning with the ugly fire in his gut, that burns through the cold, slick, sticky sensation of the ocean of blood he falls into now.

 

In his hand there is a sword that sings of the legends it has seen burns brightly in the lights, and his heart is an empty, rotting chasm where something used to be.

 

In the clinical distance, he knows he is dead, but he has never felt as undead he is now, as close to a corpse as he will ever be until he is the real thing, lain out on a battlefield or crumpled in a heap in some distant alleyway or rotting in some mass grave, and as alive as he had when he had a mind that was his own. With every rattling breath, he is dying and being reborn, with every last painful piece of himself sewn together in a pulsing, gnarled mass of scars like the leviathans in the walls, a tangled network of a system at war with itself.

 

In the lights, he glows like a corpse with a blade in hand, and the world around him falls so abruptly silent.

 

-

 

He comes to covered in blood. The sword is still in his hand, he is still in the arena, and the crowd has reached a previously unknown height of volume, whatever creature was his opponent isn't even whatever color it was at first. The Favor it wore around its neck is in his hand now, the silver material glowing ominously in the lighting, whatever color or material it's flesh was is now drenched in red. It's not uncommon for other creatures to share the blood color, especially since it's fairly common, but it still turns his stomach, as a reminder that he's killed something that has blood like him, had a life like him, something resembling a career down in the Pits.

 

He wants to lean over and retch, but he is in the public eye now, and soon he will be their chosen gladiator. He will not fail in this. He must have the status to protect his packmate. His Zethrid. He cannot do that from the position of a common fighter, can't do that without the reputation he needs to make.

 

He will remember this every time he kills.

 

He does this for her. For Zethrid. For Acxa, for Mirage. For Narti.

 

So he tosses his trophy to the ground and walks out of the deactivated bars over the arena exits, still dressed as a slave, still a slave, trailing scarlet into the sand behind him like the cloak of a king.

 

He feels cold. He feels young. He feels tired and vicious.

 

It feels unfinished.

 

-

 

He is brought out again, in this skin that is unknown to him, unfamiliar and crafted by another's hands. The unnamed masterpiece has not been taken from his hands, and he has kept it as he waited in his cell, listened to its stories with empty eyes and a vacant expression, falling into the numbness that is the counter of the bloodlust, the sick twin in its apathetic silence, the locked room in his head with padded walls that he can scream at without making a single sound. It's a buzzing room, filled with his own thoughts that betray him as surely as the Oracle, filled with echoes and endless loops that snarl in his hands, in his claws and the crown of thorns he wears, the shackles of poisoned blades wrapping around him to keep him bound and complacent.

 

The leviathans hiss and mock him as they slither through the walls, reach out and tease him with their loud, mesmerizing energy, with their constant venom. Somewhere in a distant corner of his mind that smells of fresh earth, of leaves and innovation, speaks in the voiceless way that thoughts do of the Python that guarded Delphi from the gods. The venomous behemoths in the walls guard him from reaching across the galaxy and killing that which has betrayed him. A bit presumptive of him, he supposes, to think himself a god, to make himself the sunlight in the story, the harsh thing that raises life just to feel pain, just to suffer for the sin of existing, but he has always been a heretic.

 

The monsters cloaked behind steel reach out their limbs, tease him with the promise of quintessence, to get drunk and sated on their power, to live with the featherlight weight of a thousand worlds on his shoulders. He's tempted, just for a second, by the horned creatures that make a greater evil, to take that fruit he has forbidden himself, to taste it and gain immortality, gain wisdom and will and freedom. They're all temporary though, or curses beyond imagination, and he already has as much of any of those things as is safe.

 

Again, the noise is eclipsing and consuming, rushing like the stars beyond windows he hasn't seen out of yet, roaring like a herd of feral beasts, like an ocean dragging you down to a slow death, like a star exploding into existence and the corpse of one blowing itself out of existence. It's an immense thing, something impossibly large and impossible to tell of in any kind of language. It burns and it heals and it cleanses and he feels reborn as a monster, as a being undeserving of life.

 

The words in his head are getting too loud now, are trying to speak in their speechless ways above the cacophony in the fragile reality outside of his skull.

 

 _Immortality_ , the leviathans promise from where they live, and he smiles with nothing but fangs and his own natural venom. He is already immortal, has already lived long enough, has seen too much and forgotten all that he has ever wanted to learn, remembered all that he has always wanted to keep forgotten, has lost his way and never found it again more times that he will ever want to count. It's an inconsequential immortality though, just a longer period of suffering than a normal life, because he has yet to do a damn thing with it.

 

He seeks immortality now, another inconsequential kind that is just as long lasting as any other kind, the one that lasts beyond a death. He will be their monstrous champion, be great and terrible and they will write of him in reports and messages that will be sent across the galaxy, maybe only a few mentions, but his name, the mere concept of his existence will be there until everyone else is dead and any form of immortality has been revoked from all except the truly divine. Maybe even then, if he exists in a fraction of a memory of a god.

 

He has been alive for far too long, now. He's been breathing for approximately 124,910,474,296 ticks, living this useless immortal life for far too many centafeebs. Nothing matters for right now, except the pulsing beat in his chest, the aching pieces of his mind that beg for pack, for home, for death, for blood.

 

He does not know what monster he faces now, but he aches to do only one thing as they release him from his bonds and the metal sings in his hands.

 

_**K I L L .** _

 

-

 

There is blood on his hands and death on the rotten shell of his conscience. Whatever corpses he has left behind are as mutilated as the previous, broken and long dead by the time he was hacking off limb after limb. He's nothing if not thorough, he supposes, in sick recollection from when the scarlet walls overtook any conscious thought.

 

Around him, he can feel his world ending like it has a thousand times before, stripping away his life from before, his morals and his meaning and leaving behind a blank canvas ripped beyond repair, a broken thing to repaint as his own again, to try to keep together with hopes he has lost too many times before to believe in and prayers he has forgotten the words to.

 

The scream rips its way out of his throat, a high, brutal thing, animalistic and screeching, cutting above the astronomical noise of the mob like a solar flare, dragging itself from his throat with sharp claws that shred him from within, that break him apart and piece him back together just a little off, just a little wrong, just a little different and a little more broken.

 

He is screeching something now, and the audience is falling silent to the opposition of his volume against theirs, his chanting reaching a fervor though he does not know what he is saying, what has become his newest offering to the gods.

 

It's only when he falls quiet, his throat ripped out by himself, that he hears what the crowd has picked up as his chant, repeating it back at him like a loyal army. For once, he feels in control, for a single perfect moment, he knows that the pain he feels is his own, that his voice is his own as it remains silent, that the manipulated masses answer to him, just for a moment. For a precious tick, he is the general to this vast armada of willing soldiers, and the abrupt suddenness, the allure of the power that comes so quickly, freely offered by those that don't know well enough to betray him.

 

And then he is back in the shell he calls a body, and he hears the words they repeated from him, rather than just the noise of their vocalizations, just slightly altered from his own he does not know.

 

**WE WANT BLOOD WE WANT BLOOD WE WANT BLOOD WE WANT BLOOD WEWANT BLOOD WEWANTBLOOD WEWANTBLOODWEWANTBLOODWEWANT-**

 

-

 

They come again.

 

-

 

He burns and bleeds in the sand again and again, leaves behind corpse after corpse again and again.

 

The worst thing about all of it, the thing that makes the monster in his gut howl with laughter, is that the bloodlust is becoming a part of his mind all over again, is becoming so ingrained that some days, some deaths, he's almost conscious of the destruction he causes. He doesn't know when he stops caring about everything that he sheds, every drop of blood and every shard of bone, every mindless, perfect singing swing of the unnamed savior in his hands.

 

Pack is a distant memory, the bonds fraying from the far distance, from the space he has made between him and himself, between the connections he has made and the destructive maelstrom that is the edges of his mind, swirling around the eye that is the empty white room of apathy, the echoing room that has the red edges creeping in slowly, that holds out the rushing roar of the crowds that greet him and holds in the words that are soundless.

 

They always want the blood that he gives them. He knows that he has been here for far too long now, knows that somewhere, Acxa will be tearing up creatures of flesh and bone to find him, will be searching the galaxy for a whisper of his name. He can't find her though, not in these silver shackles that make him the king in the Pits, that make him the ultimate champion, that make him the liege.

 

They call him the Champion. Then they call him the Conqueror.

 

He calls himself a monster. He calls himself a mistake.

 

He needs to kill. Murder is in his bones now, engraved with runes in his soul, burned into a separate skin that he can no longer call his own, etched into the very base of his being with careful strokes that seem to spread to infinite layers below. It burns like acid, sometimes, the need to break and shatter and bask in whatever color of life the poor creatures place before him wear. He no longer aches to take the tainted drugs in the walls, the ones that the leviathans had peddled at first, he just takes it from his enemies as they die by his blade, staying on a permanent high of the very source of life, the very source of the chaos that creates free will. He's stopped feeling nauseous when it runs out, stopped feeling sick with himself and sick on a deeper level, transcending into some higher plane of this inconsequential reality, living to an unimportant higher degree of insanity until the deaths before him are faceless and nameless as they are in the bloodlust even as he waits to heal in the white echoes.

 

The leviathans are scared. They feast on the deaths in the Pits, live from the sustenance of blood, thrive on hungrily gulping down fleeing souls. He takes those from them now, takes them away into himself until he is the monster that he has always known he is, the dangerous titan in the thin slice of space his form occupies. The walls shake when he walks, and he's not entirely certain it's not only in his head, quiver with his footsteps, and the leviathans chase at his heels like tame beasts, begging for scraps. They disgust him.

 

He walks freely from his cell when the guards ask for him. He is not theirs, not entirely, and they know that. He is loyal to his Mistress Death, her knight so unvirtuous it's almost funny. They offer him gifts, sponsors sending down collars and anklets, decorations and dew-eyed girls, new tunics and weapons, as if to keep him faithful with cheap and unwanted favors, treating him like a vicious Yupper only bound to its master by the collars and appearance, by the constant care and hunts, the treats and toys. He is not loyal to them in any way, not like they think he is. He doesn't need their killings that they give him, the meat and bone they give him to toy with, he only needs to stay where he is to find _her_.

 

They try to take the unnamed sword from him once, give him something else to fight with, and he rips off the heads of the sentries and cuts the throats of his guards. He drags them into the arena with him, tosses their bodies to the side, and then drops his sword to drop into the red-walled haze. He comes back with hot blood in the back of his throat and a largely intact corpse in front of him, with its own throat ripped messily out. They do not try to take the sword from him ever again.

 

Too much time has gone, he knows, too long even for the way his mind bends time like it and it alone is exempt from the bonds of the fabric of space and time. He's keenly aware that it is passing, can count down to the tick, but something keeps him from placing the numbers together into a sense of time.

 

He has been breathing for 125,157,658,869 ticks, he knows. He has taken too many breaths, had too many heartbeats, been in too many forms, stolen too many lives, but he doesn't know if he cares. After all, it's all so useless in the grand scheme. It's so utterly futile to try to repent what he has done, and now the regret has stewed into a grief that spoiled someway along the line into a hardened bitterness. It's pointless to regret or resent every last possibility he has killed in the quest to die correctly, to transition into that kind of whimsically depressing optimism that would just result in some kind of death he has made for himself, that in itself would be a death of himself. It is not in his nature to be a man of faith, to believe in the good of something. He is a creature of pessimism and nihilism, and he would probably be an extremist if he believed in anything but eventual decay and the consequences up until then.

 

Really, the Pits do not matter. Chaos is coming slowly, breaking everything down under that dark wave, that slow degradation of the universe, and he will not survive to see the last breaths of the universe. He believes in gods because they are convenient, not because they are all mighty. It's comforting knowing he is not the only one probably regretting this inconsequential immortality, or knowing that they achieved the only true immortality and imbedded themselves so deep into the collective conscience that they exist in both forms, if only in the mind.

 

There are footsteps down the hallway now, heavy, tromping things, consistent and unstumbling, without a hitch or skip or variation, a drumbeat in his head. The constant bridal veil of blood hazes over his vision just slightly, the red unique and precious to him, his and his alone.

 

They are coming for him again.

 

He rises to greet them.

 

-

 

The crowd is always loud, always filled with the old returning to watch him decimate more opponents and chanting his title with the practiced reverence of the long-time believers and the new screaming out his title with their blind faith or their roars of disapproval at his diminutive form against titans of other arenas or promising new gladiators or the private pets of the elite. There will always be new spectators, new eager witnesses to this tiny scrap of history that could one day be torn away and unremembered. To(night/day) there is another name chanted above his, clashing wrongly with the three syllable drone of his titles or the phrase that he has made his own.

 

Something shivers down his back like cold oil, like there are a thousand poisonous things dragging him into the dark maw of a growling cave, into the waiting mercies of a merciless pack of beasts. The unnamed sword in his hand howls and hums with tales, binding itself to his grip loyally, echoing the chant fervently.

 

Across a million worlds, something is burning, something is throbbing in the darkness, screeching like the end has come, screaming like it is living and howling like it will never die. Somewhere, in the burnt out shell of a home that was never is, there is a monster laughing, smearing the first blood over its ever hungry maw.

 

His eyes raise to the Emperor's Throne of this arena, an addition rarely used, and finds it occupied.

 

There is a shadow on the throne, not particularly massive, nor leering with sharp fangs dripping venom, but unbelievably, astronomically large, sucking all of the light out of the well-lit platform. Next to it, there is a slim silhouette, dripping with thick fabric, yellow seeming to blaze like twin torches in the shadows of a face.

 

High on his cheekbones, something blazes, not like they did when they were forged, but aching with the long lost grace they used to possess, the natural energy he used to make for his own. There are memories that he has forgotten for a reason that boil at the surface, broil and bubble and swim through the sea of the abandoned things.

 

_**ZARKON ZARKON ZARKON ZARKON ZARKON ZARKON ZARKON** _

 

His veins feel like they're trying to rip themselves out of his skin, like the blood within is rebelling against the tyrant on the throne that would've been his if he had just been a better slave, a better creature of the dark things, a better executioner, a more broken mind, a more malleable soul, a less rebellious being, a little prettier, a little stronger, a little larger, a little more and a little less.

 

The very form of the beast up in its high castle, the darkness of it, the unrelenting aura of power that sheds itself from the dark silhouette, resonates a sickly atmosphere of commanding fear, of terrified subjugation. The wisp thin figure next to it, by contrast, is unbalancing with the utter void of feeling that rushes out from it, unsettling in the same way the silence of a bloodied crib is, with the scalp-prickling lack of a sign of life. He is a black hole in form and a blaze in mind, she is a black hole in mind and blazing in form.

 

He feels cold and burning with it, drawing in breaths that are cold and dry enough to burn his lungs, to make him feel like he is drowning on the mountain he has built for himself, the higher peak he has created just so he can ascend.

 

He does not bow. He will not bow, will never bow, to the creatures that used to echo with the half-wrong sensation of a questioning pack.

 

Golden eyes glare from where they stand by their Emperor's side, cast down upon him accusingly, but he does not meet them like he wants to, greet the glowing, electric yellow with the eyes that aren't quite his. Leviathans that seem more tame than these self-taught abominations he calls his own rush around the platform in wild waves, run over the fabric of the black hole mind. He is silent against the roaring around him, from the voices that chant and howl like the winds in a hurricane, from the blood in his ears and the distant sounds of his ~~victim~~ opponent.

 

The crowd hushes as he turns away from the Emperor's Throne without the bow, without giving the respect of a gladiator before their lord, giving the required tithe of undeserved loyalty.

 

 _Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant_.

 

There is a sharp coldness that spreads down his spine like some leeching monster, some slow-acting parasite dragging him down, that speak volumes about the witch's displeasure, but the leviathans let the gate on the opposite end of the field open to allow his adversary out, eager for the scraps he will give to them. The nameless sword lives like an extension of himself as he prowls across the field to his white-furred challenger, easily three feet taller than him and six times his weight. It burns in his hand with a speechless awe, quickly sharpening itself with caution as it feels the void he is slowly consuming within himself, as it feels the monster he has made within himself that is eating himself whole, a snake eating itself out of existence.

 

The creature rushes for him, snarling with slavering jaws, with light armor keeping it's massive bulk from being too far slowed, the jeweled collar marking it as an elite pet. He doesn't care much either way for deaths like this, of animals that have only known their masters and their orders, have only ever known to kill and ignore the noise around them. He is silent as he dodges away from the first attacks and parries another, as he plans and plots uncaringly, only barely giving himself time to analyze before he throws himself into the attack.

 

Step, stab, back, circle, leap, land in the blind spot, slash, hack, stab, gouge.

 

It falls to the ground in a clean, bloody heap and the audience mutters questioningly, confused that he hasn't put on a show yet, that he hasn't torn it to pieces, drawn out his fight long and difficult, toyed with his prey before going in for the kill. Some still scream their approval, and he doesn't drink in the energy that radiates from the body, not daring to while the witch is here to watch. The leviathans feast upon it hungrily once it spreads out enough to reach them, croon in their electric way in happiness.

 

He flips his blade in a circle, flicking off some of the fresh stuff in a wide, spreading arc that falls to the ground in an almost mist. The muted cheers and even more quiet mutterings follow him while he walks back to the gate for the next martyr, the quiet words falling into the spotless sand behind him where there should be red.

 

There's something edging on his mind now, a foreign presence like tar smoke encircling the vicious red spikes of hatred and suffering, struck through with black fear and disgust, that guard his mind. It's all poisoned with bitterness, a slow and painful death for the mind, along with the envy and jealousy for everything he has never had under the lighter poison, all smeared messily over the cheval de frise that guards his head now. It's familiar, this invader, with the slink of heavy fabric brushing on the floor and the cold scales of a snake slithering on the ground with the mental stench of quintessence.

 

He snarls, cuts the presence away like an enemy doctor faced with an infection, like weeds or brambles, uncareful and insensitive to the pain he may cause. The veil grows ever darker over his eyes, turning the purple lighting into bloodied water, the only landscape he feels he has ever known hazing red, the sand morphing into the surface of a foreign planet.

 

Gold eyes seem to bore into the back of his head, but they are only in the physical world now. His mind, no matter how mutilated it may be, is his. He would rather die, would kill himself, before having his mind be another's again, before being under the constant watch and punishment of the witch once more. He will end before he allows her to begin again, will stare her in the impassive molten pools that gleam like blood on the sandy planet he had found pack on, and tear himself to shreds.

 

He would bend and break and breathe, would die, would live, would kill, would love, would do all of them in a single action to keep this tempest his own. He would and will tear himself into a million stormy pieces until he is nothing but clouds, will blow away and destroy everything that is his mind in a single tick if it meant that blessed fraction of a moment of satisfaction he would get, if it meant he could feel her hopeless rage echo with finality and leave with his sense of existing.

 

He wou-

 

There is sunlight, blood in burned grass, flowers decorated with little pieces of gore, a star burning bright over a battlefield that would've once been beautiful, over the foreign creatures that feast upon the corpses.

 

There is a cavern that erupts with fire from a thousand different places, from crevices and trenches carved heavily into the stone, sand trickling down like an hourglass from the ceiling, heat pressing from all sides, the air tasting of ash and iron.

 

There is a room with a single light on, illuminating bloodstained carpets and bags tied with neat bows, there is a whispered giggle and a hoarse word, there are screams that are music and howled pleas in a symphony.

 

There is a dark-bright-not-right place that smells of copper, of dust, of ancient things, of life and of death, of the unknown, of shadows, of rotting wood, of florescents and truths.

 

There is a seamless void that writhes impossibly.

 

Somewhere, on the other side of the arena, his challenger steps in.

 

A thousand lightyears away, where his mind has gone and chosen to stay, he feels it echoing up his bones from the soles of his feet, glowing up his spine and sparking its way through his skull, connecting with the rotting branches in his mind.

 

It looks/feels/tastes/sounds/smells/is _pack_.

 

Somewhere in the distant distances, where the worlds are being created and stars are being birthed, they are screaming with the weight of reality suddenly pressing down on them, fracturing with that insurmountable, solitary experience of the cursed miracle of existence. Somewhere else, a star is taking itself out in a final suicidal gesture, cutting its own astral throat with a blast of stardust blood. Somewhere beyond each of these, there is something terrifyingly massive collapsing in onto a space too small for itself as it shrieks into seeming nonexistence. Somewhere light is disappearing into voids like him with the same surety as the figure on the throne. Somewhere, hundreds are dying, thousands are laughing, millions are grieving, billions are breathing, trillions are living.

 

Here, the hundreds will fall. Here, the leviathans rush to his command, rush through the arena, rush under his skin.

 

One bites away the chip on his neck, crushing the trackers with the energy it makes. Others race through the stands, hungry and eager to claim their first lone kill, clamping down on necks and chests and heads, overloading and drinking in the life within them. They are starved lions tossed in a pit with a criminal, one of the more gruesome and long lasting executions, killing with the careless surety of something that has not known to consider the act they are committing. They rush and roar soundlessly, and in this pointless material world, they appear as a rush of electric purple-white, a wave that crescendos over the mob and crashes down in thick, seeking tendrils.

 

The crowd has never been as loud as when they are screaming in fear for their own lives.

 

The howls are a music he has been deaf to for far too long, the messy cacophony of unexpected danger he does not hear in the pits. It's a symphony in its chaos, in the unexplainable way that revenge is beautiful, in the wordless certainty of vengeance. It's not a choir or orchestra he is part of for once, and now he is more than the silent dancer on the stage, forced to plaster on a sharp smile and bow for the curtain; he is the one man audience, and he would love nothing more than to see this theater _burn_.

 

She stands across from him, eyes as yellow as the sun and poison, dark blue lancing down one side of her face with the starting stroke of the _heimmha_ , the signs of battle. Her lips are green like she's been drowning, the sunset orange over her eyes almost glowing. Her ears, massive and so very unsuited for fighting in the Pits, press to her skull, the smoky magenta making her a dark rainbow, something less hopeful and more sinister, something tainted but beautiful all the same. There's a collar around her neck, dark metal and silver, a single scarlet gem imbedded, marking her as a Ring Champion.

 

He looks at her and sees the fourth fallen angel that he has ever loved, sees the pieces of a life he had once dreamed of click with the finality of the eventual darkness. The world around him could burn, will burn, aches to burn and he will not care while she lives before him, while the rest of his pack are within these walls, while they are in the only safety he can give them.

 

Somewhere in the crowd, his pack is there. They are here, they are with him, and the withering things in his mind are glowing with a million colors, growing again until they could almost be mistaken for being alive, or, the gods forbid, healthy.

 

Somewhere is this crowd, his pack is here. They are calling out too, the sounds of riotous acceptance bleeding over the massive sound of fear to his ears only.

 

Somewhere, the blood descends in a curtain of his own invention, the conscious kind of reserved fury saved for Narti and Acxa alone a long forgotten memory. He has and will kill for them, a thousand times over until he is theirs and they are his and he can live without himself dying in all of the tiny ways, he will be their monster, their lord, their king, and they will be his prized generals, will command his troops of death and decay until the surety of their bonds are etched into his bones with the same certainty as the scarlet of murder.

 

Yesterday he killed for himself and a possibility in a skin that was not his. Tomorrow he will be back in his own skin, will pledge himself again to the world beyond these walls, will be selfish in the death he causes.

 

Today he will kill in this skin that is the bloodlust's chosen warrior, will tear his way through the Pits and through the Hub until he is as dark a rainbow as Zethrid. Today, today he will destroy. He will kill for them, will kill and hoard that which he kills for like a dragon.

 

He smiles with sharpened fangs and poison on his lips, and somewhere, a star dies.

 


	5. 5

She sits in the same chair she sat in before she condemned him. It's been a full centafeeb he'd spent in that special purgatory, that personalized hell that had given him the final connection, and she doesn't look any older. Her face is still long and sharp, her eyes are still the sightless, knowing silver they've always been, the sharp pattern over her scalp and the dual tendrils that are tied at the back of her head still the faded, barely-there pinkish color, like a fresh scar. She's changed her clothing, from the white and black, shapeless robe into a dress that might've once been white and perfect, tailored to her form, but now hangs loosely off of her stick-like limbs and her shrunken shoulders, the edges ragged and the whole thing stained a light, inescapable, rose with darker bits and other stains. A cape hangs off one shoulder, a rich green brocade, thick and heavy, something expensive and old, held in place with an elaborate neck piece in white and gold. Other than that, she hasn't changed in the slightest, seemingly hasn't even left her chair, isn't wielding a cup of mystery liquid as her weapon of choice, or the grandmotherly smile as a shield.

 

She seems... not entirely sad, but a bit wistful. She doesn't bother to turn her head in the direction of the front window he entered through, remains stoically in the artificial, empty embrace of worn fabric. She taps her fingers against the arm of the chair in a steady rhythm, one that echoes lightly through her bones. For someone who managed to singlehandedly destroy him all over again, she seems so... there is a word in a language he has never learned for what she is, but the best he can come up with is _small_. Her fingers are small and shriveled, like most of her is, wrinkles etched deep in a face that feels like it should be ageless, her head bowed as if in contemplation or prayer or mourning or sleep or death, her shrunken shoulders drooping in a sad way.

 

There is something that seems almost powerful, writhing around her. No, writhing is the wrong word, is is not like the leviathans that currently inhabit under his skin, it _prowls_ , like some greater and lesser predator on the hunt, less flexible and winding and sickening, but achingly bright and dark at the same time. It's the difference between a God and a Devil. The demons do not need to promote their cause, wait for people to commit themselves to the cause, they simply just take the fallen fruit from a tree of grace, give a home to those that have lost the favor they curried made of fire and pain and dark oil. The righteous is that which has made the fruit and children it has rejected, it has seen its light and maybe never forgot the darkness, but never embraced it with the same free acceptance as a demon. That which has darkness has realized itself as what it is, that which is nothing but light hasn't accepted it will make shadows.

 

She raises a hand from where she holds it in her lap, holds it up to where sunlight streams over her in messy, golden rays. The back window is spread open wide, the dusty curtains he has never seen opened before ripped down in a heap on the ground below the sill, crumpled in a pile that he can now see is a murky green without all the dust layered over them. Her hand is almost translucent from the sunlight shining through her paper thin, milky skin, highlighting thin bones that seem like they would break with a single wish.

 

She seems so fragile in form, covered in gold and green and white, the heaviness of something pressing down her diminutive shoulders, her wrists scarily thin, robe hanging off of her in worrying ways. Or, they would be worrying, if he could find it in himself to care. In the place where form meets mind, however, she is strong as ever, guarded by predators that snap electric fangs, the unholy temple she has made herself overrun and locked up with strangling vines that keep out intruders.

 

Her hand is shaking.

 

She pulls it back into her lap sharply, balling it into a fist. He doesn't take another step forward, feels strange in this skin that is so suddenly and abruptly his again, instead of this sorceress', waits where he is now and watches with a distant sort of fascination as this soothsayer, this titan of unheard and unspoken legends almost... crumbles.

 

“ _I miss colors.”_ She declares in that halfway world, and it doesn't seem like it is directed at him, it feels like he is intruding on something private and important. _“They always had so many, always so many. It's the only other thing_ he _managed to take from me, when he tried to kill us. My life is mine, and I can see clearer now than ever but color-”_ a breathy sound puffs out, _“It's been so long. So long...”_

 

There is a long silence. He doesn't say a thing. She doesn't seem to want to continue on.

 

There's a bird outside, singing something that sounds like a remembrance and feels like he has forgotten something. It's slow and almost hopeful, tentative and soft and unfamiliar with itself, and it echoes eerily.

 

Whistling, and in the kitchen, a faucet lets out a drop of water.

 

“ _...He was an ocean.”_

 

Whistling. Drip.

 

“ _He was stars in the surf, he was depths and dangers, he was a beautiful unknown. He was one of the best, I like to think. I didn't know his mind and now I never will, but I like to think he was good. I like to think that about some of them.”_

 

Whistling. Drip. Drip. Drip.

 

“ _I went to his wedding. They danced under the stars together and they held each other when the Sisters rose. Bigger they are, harder they fall, and he fell like a boulder for him. Gods, he was an idiot. He just- He just went quiet after a while, but I know he was still suffering. I still don't know when exactly he died.”_

 

An angry sound rises from her throat in the true world, claws and breaks something unspoken in the air. A small, sad sigh follows it.

 

“ _I didn't know the other innocent one that well. We were comrades and allies, but he wasn't cold like me. He was so damn bright, though. He was a star in his own right, he was- was-”_ She falters. _“He was what I regret I could never save, that I could never know to understand. Sometimes I don't think there's a word in any language that could explain him.”_

 

Whistling. Drip. Drip. Drip. The bird outside peters off into silence. Drip. Drip. Whistling. Drip.

 

“ _I don't have sympathy for either of the kings. Pointless warmongers, the both of them. Grief makes monsters out of men and men out of monsters. Pity makes both of them stronger in their convictions. I despise that I once pitied either of them, but I do not regret that which I have done. I simply regret that I never realized what I thought were fellow monsters were men.”_

 

Whistling. In the far, distant, near-silence, there is a child laughing.

 

“ _Come then, my Lord Conqueror.”_ There doesn't seem like there was a time when she shifted from talking to the air to talking with him, but the transition seems as natural as anything else. _“You are stronger now than when you left, my fledgling emperor. Yet still... you do not show that which you have gained proudly. You hide behind the skin you have made yours, but not your own. You suffocate yourself in this facade, this act of yours. Come now, no more.”_

 

Something in his skin shifts in the most natural way it can, for the first time in a little over a millafeeb. He doesn't move to brush against any of the new things that emerge and cave like the surface of a planet over his husk of a self that is so right and yet so alien all the same, but he can feel them stretch and spread, can feel his skin molding to fit perfectly, mottling and smoothing out.

 

He hisses instead, snarls at her, makes the first noise he has in however long he's spent on this godsforsaken planet. “I am not yours, wretch.” He doesn't try to take the skin away, though, doesn't strip it away from his bones balefully, doesn't because despite everything, despite every reason he has to hate, despite the voice yelling at him, taunting with sibilant whispering and howling like an animal that she should die in the most painful of ways, that she should be torn apart limb by limb and have her own skin turned inside out, made feel foreign to her by someone else and see how she likes it, she almost doesn't seem worth it.

 

“ _No.”_ she says, with a breezy, soft, slow melancholy, _“You are not. And you never were. You were mine like the stars, simply something beautiful to watch age.”_ A smile will be stretching across her features with the reluctant volatility of a planet collapsing, _“You were dangerous to look at and even more dangerous to get close to.”_ She stands up from her chair, not in the one smooth movement she used to, but in a careful, creaking mixture of gestures, smooth as sandpaper. All she does is step closer to the window that pours sunlight in golden waves, stares sightlessly out into a warm, comforting unknown.

 

“I was a monster, same as you.” He rebuts, but it feels wrong in the way that he does it, like he's following some sick script, like he could leap out and do anything and nothing would matter but the lines that feel like he reads them from some grand cosmic script. “You can hardly expect a wolf raised in a lion's den to be tame, isn't that the point, isn't that why you made me yours? So tell me, one monster to another, _why did you do it_.” He's shaking, he realizes in a distance, his hands loosely splayed and trembling as he burns.

 

“ _You'll have to be more specific, Champion.”_ She turns her head to the side, giving him a murky view of her profile backlit by the sunlight. _“Why did I turn you in? I already said, because the voices told me to. Because you burned and you needed somewhere to burn down, because you had all of that blood that needed to stain your hands for what you need to do. You needed to find your pack, my Lord, you needed your Generals, and you weren't going to find them in the starways.”_ She shakes her head ruefully, as if accepting some horrible truth she has never told herself, _“Because I am heartless and I needed to see someone suffer for me. Because I wanted to stop feeling again, I wanted that innocent child I saw once to die completely, I wanted to stop feeling guilty._

 

“ _I helped you in the beginning, I brought you in and I thought that I could keep that child from turning, that maybe the blood hadn't soaked through your fabric yet.”_ She rambles now, a thick spiel of words that leads one into the next, a string in a tapestry pulling the entire piece of art apart. _“I thought if I was just good enough, for just a small amount of time, I could help you be good enough too. But, well... I suppose good's always been subjective for me.”_ Bitterness sings through the air, _“When you left I was happy. I thought I'd succeeded in ridding the world of one more evil, of protecting everyone who never cared for my suffering from another murderer...”_ A wry smile twisting across her silhouetted lips, an acknowledging, almost regretful tilt of her head down, _“...but you came back. You came back carrying that stupid garotte all covered in gore, and I stopped trying to be good because I didn't think there was a point to it.”_ A considering pause, then a rough, quiet sound puffing out of the darkly scarred column of her throat. _“Then again, I suppose that evil is always subjective too.”_

 

“...Why?”

 

“ _Why what?”_

 

“Why, out of the billions you could've chosen, why did you choose me? What was so damn special that you saw in me that you thought you could... could- _fix me_.” The word tastes like ash and iron on his tongue, tastes like copper and blood, tastes like the sword he lived by and the lives he took by her graces, like a poison of his own making.

 

“ _Do you want the long answer or the uncomplicated one?”_

 

“I want the truth!” Is he desperate? Is that what colors his tone now, that bleeds into his voice and burns his lips and gums with the mere taste of it? Is that what makes the tap dripping and the bird outside disappear into the background noise, the spectral roar of a thousand clamoring voices pounding through his head with knifelike precision?

 

“ _Oh, love, you forget that's subjective too. Regardless...”_ She takes a few seconds to consider, tilting her head and letting out a slow, raspy exhale. _“I suppose it was that you shone in that skin that wasn't yours. You were so bright and so dark, and there was so much_ potential _in that little form of yours. And then you started to raise yourself into something with that special little edge, with whatever brutal grace your heritage gave, and you reminded me of the monsters and men I once knew._

 

“ _I must say, though, you don't have much of your father. It's in the eyes, mostly, the rest is all your mother. She was a broken woman, even before those little snakes whispered in her ear.”_

 

Something in his head whispers and giggles about fallen angels courting demons, singsongs of the original sin, echoes _Eve, Eve, Eve,_ and then breaks into raucous laughter, tempts with a flash of pearly white venom. He stiffens, _you don't have much of your father_ , echoing sharply and falling into the wingbeats of a thousand burning butterflies as they cram down his throat to suffocate. _It's in the eyes_.

 

“ _Oh yes, I knew your father. Did you know he used to be a good man? Did you know he once loved? Blasphemy, I know, to say that that creature ever loved anything, but the truth is strange that way. Or maybe it's a truth. It feels like one to me, at least.”_ There's a bitter sound that scrapes away from the raw, scarred ruin of a throat, something that in another world might've been a laugh. _“I flew with him, I fought with him, I bled with him, and we were pack. His first pack, and he tore it all apart without ever even caring.”_ She snarls soundlessly, lip curling and hands shaking in their balled fists by her side. _“He was as good as he could've been, back then. His wife was beautiful, I think. She had Marks like yours, near the end, and I'd guess they're still strong now. I was his left hand woman, and he came to me when he felt helpless, but then she was his, she was something more than I could ever be, and she was his fixation.”_ His cheekbones burn with something that drips like acid down to the edges of his jaw, that runs in miniature rivers down his neck, pools somewhere where the void in his chest is heavy until it burns like he is living.

 

“ _And then I was... I was nothing to him. I couldn't even be an acquaintance, because she thought I was a threat, all I could do was answer when he called us all together and watch him collapse from a distance.”_ There is an eerie silent stillness about her now, like every muscle in her body is tensed, like the world is holding its breath, and not even the faulty sink tap will dare to intervene. _“A scientist to the very last, hmm? To just sit there and watch and do absolutely_ nothing _until the experiment has already self-destructed. To just watch the reading and compile the data and create a report that will never really matter.”_

 

She shakes in the sunlight like a leaf in his bottled storm, and he doesn't know if she's laughing or crying or in pain, the fractured aura that spreads from her and seeps into the ground. The stained dress, maybe once regal, hangs off of her skeletal form in waves, and when she turns around to face him with sightless silver, he can see that the rose stains are heavy around the neckline.

 

Her arms spread out, in the universal position for a martyr, head tilted up and throat bare. _“Well?”_ She snaps, and for the first time, her grief carries on the edge of her voice, snaps off the brittle ends of her armor, takes away all of her spikes and traps, her misty battlefield burning away under the sunlight she stands under, until it's just her with a broken crown, a fallen queen with nothing left to lose, _“Tell me then, your Majesty, do you have mercy for your demons? Do you regret your father's fallen angels for him, do you dare to take his sins as your own, to take the deeds of those that share your name as your own, dare to regret that which you can't control?”_ Her hands fall slack at her sides and there's that familiar desperation he felt earlier echoing in the ghosts of her tone, _“When the Witch Queen calls, will you reject her_ mercy _-”_ and the word is hissed with all of the poison of a million serpents, _“Will you strike out your own way, like you did once? Take all that you can care for now and run and hide and forget yourself until you're nothing but- but-”_ Her mind-voice falters and the closest thing to a tortured laugh erupts from her true tongue, _“worthless scrap.”_

 

“ _Will you be me?”_

 

It's tempting. Of course it is, that's the point, that's what's supposed to make him a hero in some strange, pointless ritual of unwanted mercy, that's supposed to make him some strict, vengeful god still capable of sympathy, that's supposed to make him feel less dead and more like some gracious deity. It's tempting in the way that ancient, sinister things are, they promise power, promise freedom from the faceless enemy, promise free will as they take it with promises that they'll give it back later, after they've beat it to hell and annihilated its form completely.

 

It's tempting to say yes, because he does regret what he has done, and the ghost of his kinds faults dog his heels more fastidiously than his own sins. He wants to spit in the witch's face and walk away and laugh as she can't control him any longer, wants to follow up on old plans and hunker down on planet after planet as another faceless being, another cog in this stupid war. After all, you can't win or lose an infinite game, especially if you yourself are an infinite being, the only way you could ever do both is a simultaneous victory and loss in the act of ceasing to play, of removing yourself from the machine altogether.

 

But...

 

But he is not a god. He is a man, backed up by the pointless gift of immortality, and he is a creature of sins, built from a skeleton of a thousand vices. If he was any worse, this conversation would not be happening, and if he was any better, he would have already answered 'yes', because then mercy would be a familiar friend and guilt would be his only constant.

 

But he is not steeped in the essence of either of those things.

 

An infinite game of war, of galactic politics turned insidious and dark, that is what he was built to play, because he is tired and sharp but he bargains with the devil every day just to take another breath, another step, to not slit his own throat with the blade he brought back from the Pits. He will fight like the star he is, he will implode and explode and drag them in with the weight of his existence, will kill selfishly and pointlessly and with only his quicksilver allegiances to guide his blade, his claw and fangs and the demons that slither loyally under his skin, the energy that trails him and makes him its home, bends itself to a will he has not forgotten is his yet.

 

He will not run, he will not hide, because he is selfish enough to make the morbid his omphalos, to make it the point he revolves around loyally, to make it his god next to Samtal and her parent. Not quite Griemm, who deals with the aftermath, nor Seltaix who frequently preludes the act, but the breathless moment between after it is done, before it is set down perfectly, and as it is realized, and for the cold, unfeeling obliteration of a separate being, alive and thinking, the uncaring, casual ways of intimate destruction he hasn't quite fully mastered yet.

 

_Breathe in._

 

_Breathe out._

 

“No.”

 

It feels like the gods are laughing.

 

“ _Good.”_ Her chair creaks when she sits back in it, running her bony knuckles over the fabric of the arm and sighing roughly. _“She'll contact you tomorrow, your witch mother.”_ He stiffens, and she waves her hand dismissively, _“She won't know you as her Champion, but she will remember you as smart enough to break out under her thumb, to break away from her mind, and know that she cannot control you. She'll try to conscript you into the Conquest. Whether or not you accept is your own choice, but know that she will find you no matter where you go.”_

 

“What changes if I accept? What's different if I refuse?”

 

“ _How would I know?”_ She shrugs playfully, _“I know what the voices say, and what I see. I know that the stars come when it is dark and that the galaxy is becoming restless, and I know that the best place to take down a beast is from within its cave.”_ She smiles again, a familiar tug on the corners of her mouth that would send her eyelids fluttering closed if she had any, a sad, reminiscent, soft creature that does not belong on the face of a woman who has seen systems die, has killed a few herself. _“I am not infallible, however, and who knows, maybe there's a rebellion that would take someone faceless like you've made yourself.”_ Again, that smile ghosting, an antithetical paradox of an expression, _“Who am I to say?”_

 

He steps forward now, take the other chair, fingers the blade at his side that sings of broken deities and forgotten remembrances. The table in front of the two hasn't moved as long as he's known her, and if it weren't for the unsteady rocking of the one unmatched leg, he would assume it had been formed from the floor itself, grown from the boards as a natural feature of the house. It's never been fully cleaned, as long as he's known, something always covering the engraved surface, a revolving door of used tea mugs, braille books, puzzle boxes made of a thousand pieces, and tools. Now though, it is cleared, all of the symbols shining white, and it feels somehow... wrong.

 

Everything feels wrong, though, unbalanced and strange. He doesn't know why this detail bothered him so much.

 

They sit in silence for a long while, but the tap has stopped dripping so there's nothing but that stupid bird keeping up its tune. Nothing but their breathing, hers raspy and his slow, the beating of their hearts, their empty little voids.

 

Is it selfish that he wants to stop this moment now and never think again? Is it wrong that he wants to halt everything and cease breathing, keep this single moment frozen as the last thing he will ever know, to run and escape out of the universe with a last breath, to say 'good game' and leave it all behind?

 

Would it be too sudden if he grew claws and fangs and tore this whole gods-forsaken place down atom by atom and relished in the unapologetic, wanton destruction, if he became a god himself, an act of blasphemy so thick and dark that he became the manifestation of the concept himself, too much of one thing for this fragile, fallible form to hold?

 

Can he bear this silence a tick longer?

 

She lets out a rusty exhale, maybe a sigh, maybe a laugh, maybe a sob, all in some other world where her throat isn't a gnarled mess of scar tissue and she speaks her words with something more physical than her mind. It breaks the hazy world he's thrown himself into, breaks the illusion of a looped world, where nothing exists but birdsong and breath.

 

“ _It's time_.” She says.

 

He does not ask for what. He doesn't need to.

 

The blade is soft and silent when he takes it from his side, as he stands and raises it in salute. The surface is pristine, almost mirrored, and a stranger's face stares back at him, a scar running from one temple to the base of its jaw, another cutting over an eye, another pitting in part of a cheek, blue eyes ringed with purple set against glowing gold sclera. Regal and sharp, it's the face of a once-almost king, and it doesn't seem like it belongs to him, so he will make it so. Red scythes down, like his blood, like the sand in the Pits, like skies and broken things, from the edges of its eyebrows, curling like a predator on its cheekbones and howling down to cut over its lips like a hushing finger, the casual and careless gesture of a coldblooded killer.

 

It isn't feral like him, it doesn't invoke images of creatures in the night with slavering jaws and a hunger so deep it consumes everything else, it is something that reminds you of some small, uninhabitable moon, something old and silent, cratered and mountainous, unsurvivable and untouched. Silver hair reaches behind his back, grown out from uncaring years of being stuffed beneath alternate identities, small illusions and greater magic.

 

It is him.

 

He flicks the blade down, and the scarlet burns from his cheekbones and into his vision, into his mind.

 

 _I won't be sorry._ He thinks as he falls with a willful finality, with the distant observance of a scientist against a wild creature.

 

“ _I know, Lotor.”_

 

-

 

He pieces himself together a new self when he rises out of the sea of blood with a hollow gasp, makes it and embraces it as he wipes the blood off of his new weapon, the thing he will carry into the wars he can almost see in his mind, the tool he will use to devastate a thousand planets, the countless billions that will bow to him in some distant, uncertain future.

 

He keeps himself sharp, keeps his features like a blade, keeps them looking delicate and almost decorative, makes himself look unscarred, like battle doesn't reside in his bones and etch and paint itself in thick lines over his skin. He hides his Marks under again, keeps his ears tall and sharp, keeps his eyes bright and dangerous. He takes a kitchen knife and cuts off the matted stuff on his ends, leaving it down to the center of his back, a silver waterfall that shines in light like the glint of a dagger, whittles himself down into something graceful and beautiful, into something people will sneer about and toss to the floor, a glass statue that holds some dark and dangerous spirit, just waiting to be broken and brought out to play.

 

He very carefully doesn't look at the body in the chair, still staring as sightlessly as ever out of the open window, as he crawls back out of the window he'd entered what felt like a century ago, unfurls from it like some predator from hibernation, hungry and desperate.

 

The bird isn't singing anymore. It hasn't made a single noise since the red came and went in the space of a few uncountable heartbeats.

 

He can see why now.

 

On the edge of the clearing where the Oracle's house resides, there is a familiar creature, gnawing on the mangled carcass of its prey, sharp golden eyes not leaving his even as it strips feathers and meat away from bone, sharp teeth making quick work of the songbird.

 

“Hello, Kova.” He whispers, and the name is rusty on his tongue, it's been far too long since he's seen the creature he ran with, the one who broke away from the Witch's control and followed him with howling cries and blood on the pads of her paws.

 

There is a whispering in the trees, and Kova resettles into a standing position, almost like she's at attention, though her eyes remain trained on him, the dead bird at her feet only half-eaten. From the branches above a clawed hand appears through the leaves, followed by the rest of a form, landing on all fours as a scaled tail unwraps from a branch above, rising to stand on two feet.

 

Dark blue, and a streak of purple that he put there. Scales and a markless neck that he knows will not speak, an eyeless face, a fanged mouth partially open, tasting the air with a forked tongue. A hood covering small ears that he knows are twitching right now in time with Kova's to capture as much audio as possible.

 

 _Hail, Emperor._ She says and this is purely thought, this is something better and worse than the Or- than the corpse's soundless words, _Hail, Son of the Stars._ A grin forms on her face, _Hail, Savior._ Her head bows, but her form remains stable and still, tail coiled like a weapon in its own right, _Hail, Lotor._

 

“Hail, General.” He returns, his acknowledgment of something greater than their fallible flesh and bone, a reminder of a legacy they will carry into the stars, “Hail, Daughter of Smoke.” The title feels heavy as the ash of it puffs out of his throat and settles on his tongue, “Hail, Priestess.” And he steps forward, a tremulous thing that hurts almost, “Hail, Narti.”

 

She moves like the night, like the wind is carrying her form from some great act of destruction, and she is by him in a second, forehead pressed to his, one clawed hand securely at the back of his neck, bending him forward to meet her mind to mind.

 

He knows her, now, with this touch, knows that she could sink claws into his mind now, become a drug of the same kind as the Witch, only one he hasn't become insensitive to, a fresh new hell of a thing, could control his every action.

 

She doesn't, and he knows she won't.

 

 _She is dead._ It isn't a question, isn't an uncertain statement.

 

“Yes.” He answers, regardless.

 

 _Come then, we wait for you back in the ship._ And he can feel their dark-lights now, can feel Acxa's tortured soul aching for him, can feel Zethrid's sand and metal and blood that echo his own head, can sense Mirage's dark, twisting heart.

 

He sets his eyes for the distant horizon, towards the echoes, and starts walking.

 

-

 

The will in the Oracle's house will remain untouched for a long while, gathering dust where it lays on the kitchen table, signed and sealed with a signet ring hailing from a long-lost House from some long-forgotten belt of stars.

 

It details where exactly the copious amounts of property and money she has gained over the ten thousand decafeebs she has lived will go, sets aside most of it to charities that are actually fronts for various Rebel movements. She leaves the rest for the man she names as her heir, and later on, in another section of the document, clarifying that even though she has died by his hand, it is still rightfully his, especially by the Dalterion custom of right by conquest for killing the last remaining holder of a House Ring.

 

She signs it in verdant green ink, in thick, spiky letters, a script as ancient as her.

 

She signs it Trigel.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So uh, season five. 
> 
> Just end me.
> 
> I haven't even done any work on the next chapter, and I am famously bad at updating things. I will probably have it out someday but don't hold your breath.


	6. 6

 

There's blood on his hands and a body on the ground and he's as blind as the two creatures that have made him into a better monster, that are as dead as the other.

 

This- it wasn't supposed to happen- damn it she was supposed to be- how could? She was fine, she told him- she lied, she lied _she lied_ how could she- how could he kill the first one he lov- nothing matters because-

 

She was supposed to be safe.

 

She was supposed to be secure with Kova as her eyes and his protections to the witch's mind, but somehow she'd wriggled through the cracks and now-

 

Now there's a corpse on a floor with a bloody halo and it coats the sword she watched him reforge and the hands she had held in the days where he felt like if he said a single word the universe would collapse in around him.

 

He wants to gather her up in his arms and tell her that he is sorry, that this was never meant to happen, that she will live on one day, he swears it-

 

But instead he steps over the body that feels almost like his own, like his soul, his black, corrupted thing has leapt out of his mortal-immortal form and is silently killing a million worlds. There is an empty hole in his mind, where there used to be a bridge to her soft smiles and the tiniest of movements, where there used to be someone who would lean against him and purr brokenly whenever he ran a hand over her scalp, the one who would braid his hair with the deftest of hands and who loved it whenever he would kiss her on the hand like royalty, to the one who would hold a hand to his neck and calm him when he woke up screaming for blood.

 

He leaves as his base, where he conducted his research with the leviathans shrieking under his skin for so long, where he has built his greatest creations and lived with his pack, collapses behind him, and he does not look back to where it implodes with his young-oldest siste-

 

But she is not pack any longer. She is a corpse, and now she is stardust on solar winds.

 

He listens blankly as the radio announces that he is traitor to the throne, and some distant part of him screams with relief.

 

_Finally._

 

There is hope still, he thinks. Maybe, just maybe, if he can pass through the rift and into pure quintessence, he can bring her back, and she can rule with him as a being of pure ~~corruption~~ magic. Maybe if this longest, most controlled experiment of his can last, he can keep them all alive with all the powers of the universe at their fingertips, to mold and shape as they will, so that they can become more than eternal sufferers and the gods of a new era.

 

He will succeed, he tells himself, as the rift approaches the creation he made from a remnant of another universe, as he closes his eyes and tries to ignore the moisture that forms at the corner of his eyes, that distinct, prickling, wet sensation forming at the front of his mind that heralds tears.

 

He has to succeed.

 

But he doesn't.

 

He fails.

 

He fails and for the first time since he was a child and allowed to feel it, he grieves.

 

He stands on a void and a precipice, feels like he is breaking apart, like nothing will last beyond this wretched space in time, like he will fall asleep and die when he does, left to eternally dream of a better place.

 

But he has only had voids and nightmares when he sleeps.

 

He can distantly hear them, can hear Ezor's voice in its comforting hum that reminds him of twilight through windows, bloody meat cleavers, and body bags in neat rows. Zethrid, in her rumbling growl like earthquakes and the distant roar of crowds thirsty for blood and the sound of spiked clubs meeting skin. He can't hear Acxa, but she always sounds like desert sands with the sharpness of a slaver's whip and wolves howling in the night. Narti-

 

Narti is gone.

 

She's gone gone gone because he was too stupid to realize what he was falling for, gonegonegone because he was a damn fool, gonegonegonebecauseheputhisbladeacrossherneckanddidn'tstoppushinguntiltherewasnothingbutbloodandairbeneathit.

 

There's a sound behind him, the soft steps of feet, and when he turns, Acxa greets him with a blaster.

 

For some reason, having her do this makes it an even fresher betrayal, a more unique way of destruction. She who walked in the sands, who was the first of his pack to return a bond made in blood, to kill one of his own foes for him. She had horns spread for the longest time, searching and seeking for blood, for resolution, to gain her pack fully.

 

She had met him in the aftermath of his final discovery, when he was covered in blood and wearing a stranger's face, and she had held him until he slipped back into his familiar skin, the one he had worn for so many countless years.

 

For a precious second, he hopes that the blaster is set to kill.

 

They both need the absolution.

 

“For Narti.”

 

Pain.

 

-

 

Later, after he is free from the captivity of his pack and from the massive fleet of his father's, he allows himself to break.

 

He sits and trembles in the cockpit, screams to the stars and can almost see cracks forming in the viewscreen before they heal themselves on whatever magic his ship runs itself on.

 

He mourns her with feral howls, mourns everything he has lost, and feels himself break again and again. He screams and shrieks out to the void, until he has nothing left, no voice, no emotion, simply this yawning, burning emptiness that rises like a monster from within his imperfect, horrific oblivion.

 

He sits, basking in the darkness, until his radio crackles and delivers him what might be a death sentence and might be a sign from the gods, and the leviathans that had abandoned him in his oblivion come slithering under his skin.

 

He hopes its a death sentence he flies toward, but he could care less. He has demons and devils to kill, monsters like him to destroy, because he does not deserve redemption, and he will not let any more saints die because he has remained in the shadows.

 

He aches to kill, to become sharp and deadly and become his own blade, to drag himself over the skin of the Galran Empire and bleed it dry until his own iron inhabits the corpse of it and he too can die with the rest of his bloodline.

 

He can think of when the witch-mother talked to him in her rusty tones, and told him it was high time the Prince returned to the Empire's ranks, that he conquer like all the rest. And he dreamed of the throne, of how it might feel to assume it and then burn down the whole damn place down, or just watch the military shred each other to pieces. He thought of the Oracle, the corpse he had left behind in her own home, staring out into the beyond, and he had accepted.

 

He can think of the second time she talked to him, of her sharp tones as she told him to assume the throne and he took it and ran off with it, because he wanted to be a god with no consequences.

 

He can, but he doesn't, because he won't give her that, and he can feel her on that ship, clawing at his mind for a grip, wanting to roost and remain there forever, and he will not let her know that he remembers.

 

He steps out of the ship that reeks of his broken mind, the corners of it dripping and condensing into a sheet of the insanity he had spread across them in wide, vicious streaks, and lets it permeate and sink into the perfect white of the castle around him, the lions that he hasn't felt since the Oracle roaring back in response to the silent, hissed challenge of his leviathans.

 

He stands like the fallen royalty he is before them, and there is something in the shadows of fear and hatred and cautious hope in their faces that makes an unnameable thing within him break beautifully.

 

 _Oh,_ he thinks, as he spills secrets like the broken faucet the day he killed the Oracle.

 

 _Oh,_ he thinks, as he is handcuffed and brought down into a prison cell that doesn't feel a thing like the one in the Pits.

 

 _Oh,_ he thinks, as he watches the one not in paladin armor that he distinctly remembers piloting the black lion the last time they met walk away with a blade etched with _loyalty_ at his hip.

 

 _Oh,_ he thinks as he is left alone in the darkness with only a few beams of light from above and the illumination of his cell for him to see by, that will light his forged features with a light like a knife blade.

 

 _Oh,_ he thinks, and says nothing for a long, long time while the numbness comes again.

 

He no longer has his bonds to his generals. They snapped when Acxa fired the stun-blast at him, and left him with nothing but his unmoored mind. Maybe if he sits in the silence long enough, he will feel like he's dead as well, and that Narti is waiting in a higher hell for him to redeem himself enough to join her.

 

But, no. He is simply dead to them, but not the rest of the world.

 

He is supposed to be empty.

 

So _why?_

 

Why does he feel like this?

 

Why, as he fights for his right to speak and walk among them – because he is not a tame wolf, but he has a worse enemy to fight and doesn't need to bother with these wolves in sheeps clothing that have forgotten they can howl – does he feel this clinging sense of light?

 

Why, as he kills his father – the black bayard fits beautifully in his hand, not because it is meant for him, but because Loyalty had felt like the same, and Faith had snapped with the same heady weight – does he feel this crushing _hope_ within him?

 

Why, as he lights the torch of the Kral Zera – he looks the witch-mother directly in the eyes as he claims his throne – does he feel like the crown will not be his alone?

 

Why, as he claims a world and an empire and then travels to an impossibility, do his marks burn in the way they do when he lies?

 

Why, standing on the steps of a temple he has used the most recent centafeebs of his life to find, does he feel at peace though he doesn't know a damn thing?

 

He doesn't know.

 

(Yes he does he's a dirty liar)

 

No, he really doesn't.

 

(Oh, but he does)

 

Maybe he knows when the one with the blade marked with _loyalty_ comes back with a woman that seems to almost look into his soul, and she smiles and bows in the traditional way.

 

Maybe he knows when he stands in the training room and uses his reforged sword until it's heavy in his hand and he shakes for the things he loves that are stashed in the elsewhere, that he can't get without risk of the witch finding them.

 

Maybe he knows when she arrives anyway, with half the fleet behind her, and he doesn't hesitate in the slightest before Faith sings in his hands again, when he doesn't stop for a second, carving a bloody path toward her.

 

Maybe its when he holds Loyalty in his claw-tipped hands for the first time since he was named Conqueror against his witch-mother's throat, and his glamour falls away until its him and the ugly, burning marks on his cheeks, the scars he has gained from the time under her eyes and the times after it.

 

Maybe its after she escapes and one of the others comes up behind him and touches him softly, and despite everything he has known and learned, he doesn't sink his fangs into them, his claws and blades remaining sheathed.

 

 _Oh, that's why,_ he thinks.

 

And so he crumbles onto the ground, promising himself that tomorrow he will rebuild, and he will not be alone when he does it.

 

His pack sings around him.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This might be a disappointing end, but hopefully it's not too bad. This is possibly my first time actually finishing a chaptered thing to its full conclusion.
> 
> If you like it, please leave a review, because I desire companionship and recognition.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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